Re: Need advice on reliable way to identifyIE asthe browser

Nathan

Have you use Firebug and has it been useful for looking at the DOM? I find it indispensable now for debugging scripts and all. To those who don't know, it's a plug-in. Makes Firefox so much better to work in than IE.

Vern

-------------- Original message --------------
From: Nathan Andelin <nandelin@xxxxxxxxx>

From: Pete Helgren
So, I am curious, do you have a tool that can see what DOM
event was triggered, deep in the bowels of some DOM object?

I sometimes pull up the DOM Inspector in Firefox. It's a great tool for
learning the DOM. I don't recall if it's a down-loadable plug-in. It's just on
my Tools menu. But it didn't really help in this case.

When I began looking at rich component libraries like Ext js, I liked the look
and feel of the components, but began to get concerned about the size of the
libraries, and the "object literal" notation required to define each component.

Then I considered what it might take to extend a component. Take for example,
embedding another table inside a parent table cell. I couldn't figure out how
to do that in the framework. It appeared to me that the developers kept adding
more components to the library, rather than extending and complicating the
programming interface of say their base classes.

Then I considered the idea of using HTML to build tables, but providing methods
for converting the HTML to DOM elements via "add", "replace", and "remove"
methods. So I could easily add, replace, or remove any row in any table, at any
time, and the row could have any layout that anyone might want to implement. We
wouldn't be stuck with what's in the box.

But since the developer has essentially complete control over the layout, and
can nest tables, within tables, within whatever, I needed to write a routine
that would inspect the DOM, one layer at a time, asking "are you my mother", to
implement the desired row "click" behavior. The routine can't expect the layout
to be the same from one application to the next.

Sorry for the long answer.

Nathan.