Re: Need advice on reliable way to identifyIE asthe browser

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.