jQuery fadeIn and fadeOut problems with IE8 Last updated:29 October 2010

I’ve just written a jQuery plugin to allow a user to simply configure some dropdown menu animations. It tests fine in IE6 and IE7, but the fadeIn/fadeOut didn’t work in IE8. Unbelievable. It astonishes me the things that fail in IE8 but were fine in IE7.

The specific instance here was fading a drop down ul element, which was positioned absolutely with respect to an li element with position:relative. You know, standard stuff. Turns out IE8, position:relative and fade don’t play nicely. The solution in the end turned out to be applying:

filter:inherit

to the li element. Applying this to the ul has no effect. This doesn’t seem to cause any issues with IE6 or IE7, fortunately.

I also found that in IE8 as the fadeIn completes, the faded text appears to jump a pixel to the left. This isn’t tragic, but it’s a bit irritating. I found that this only happened if I used the fadeIn method. If I fade in by using .animate() to change the opacity, then the jump goes away.

You can see the final result here if you’re interested.

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Posted in Web Design and Build | 6 Comments

Preventing doubleclick firing two clicks with jQuery Last updated:14 November 2010

A user of my wife’s workshop page reported that they couldn’t click to expand a div – when they did it opened and then immediately closed again. Experimentation showed that in fact they were double clicking rather than single clicking – registering two click events in fact. My original code was:

$('h3 span a').click(function() {
    $(this).parent().parent().siblings(".event_hidden").slideToggle();
    return false;
});

When I started thinking about it, I couldn’t immediately see how to separate the two events – after all, a doubleclick is just two clicks, isn’t it? Fortunately jQuery provides an easy solution by using the event properties:

$('h3 span a').click(function(event) {
    if(event.detail==1){//activate on first click only to avoid hiding again on double clicks
        $(this).parent().parent().siblings(".event_hidden").slideToggle();
    }
    return false;
});

Edit 14 November 2010 Actually, problem not quite solved, since I found that IE8 and under (I don’t know about IE9) don’t recognise event.detail, and hence the code above prevents the slideToggle working entirely. Fortunately, neither does the doubleclick problem seem to affect these browsers, and hence I amended my code to:

$('h3 span a').click(function(event) {
    if(!event.detail || event.detail==1){//activate on first click only to avoid hiding again on double clicks
        $(this).parent().parent().siblings(".event_hidden").slideToggle();
    }
    return false;
});

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Posted in Web Design and Build | 3 Comments

Experiments with @font-face Last updated:29 October 2010

I’ve previously been a fan of Cufon for rendering web fonts, but this morning I thought I’d have a play around with @font-face. I tried it, of course, in Firefox first, and it worked. Hurrah. But IE uses its own proprietary font format .eot, created, or so I thought, by Microsoft’s own product WEFT. I’d heard the WEFT tool was unpleasant to use, but this still hadn’t prepared me for the grim reality….

However, via this excellent article I found Font Squirrel which does all the work for you.

Internet Explorer continues to be a pain, however, and applying the necessary css for IE needs some novel css construction – see the article for details. Having overcome this…

…you should see this text in a NASA-like font…

…unless you’re viewing in Opera 9, which doesn’t support @font-face. Otherwise, nice.

EDIT THE NEXT MORNING: After further experimentation I’m slightly put off by the “flash of unstyled text” which is noticeable in Firefox at least. There are some javascript hacks to try and address this, but if I’ve got to use javascript I think I’ll stick to Cufon for now.

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Problems with From and BCC headers in PHP mail() Last updated:29 October 2010

Had a funny one this week. My wife discovered that nobody on her mailing list had received any emails since we swapped hosting packages back in May. Before the swap things were fine in a Windows server, now clearly not fine on Linux. On further investigation, I spotted that the From: and Bcc: headers weren’t being split out properly, and hence we were getting the Bcc was included in the From: field like this:

From:mail@mydomain.com Bcc: mail1@test.com, mail2@test.com etc etc

This was my original code:

$headers  = 'MIME-Version: 1.0' . "\n";
$headers .= "Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8" . "\n";
$headers .= "From: Sender <sender@mydomain.co.uk>"."\n ";
$headers .= "Bcc:".$bcc."\n";

mail($to, $subject, $message,$headers)

Same result replacing \n with \r\n. No joy even on Coding Forums, but after a lot of Googling I found the solution, which was to replace the newline characters with the PHP constant PHP_EOL:

$headers  = 'MIME-Version: 1.0' . PHP_EOL;
$headers .= 'Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8' . PHP_EOL;
$headers .= "From: Sender <sender@mydomain.co.uk>".PHP_EOL;
$headers .= "Bcc:".$bcc.PHP_EOL;

mail($to, $subject, $message,$headers)

Glad to say this did the trick. PHP version 5.2.13 if anyone’s interested.

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Everyone wants to know about jQuery UI Last updated:29 October 2010

Over the past month, the traffic on my site has more than doubled.

Graph showing web traffic increase

And it’s almost entirely due to this page which I wrote about using jQuery UI Slider for a vertical scrollbar. This one page now gets 30% of all the traffic. Even the traffic patterns are completely different, most hits to this page coming in the working week and from India and the US.

Amazing…

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