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Zugg
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Joined: 25 Sep 2000
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Location: Colorado, USA

PostPosted: Sun Mar 09, 2003 7:43 pm   

DHTML menus and Netscape 7.0
 
I've been told that the pulldown DHTML menus on this site don't work in the new Netscape 7.0. Apparently Netscape changed something. I hate when they do that, and maybe it's a bug they will fix, but would someone be willing to look into this to determine if there is a quick fix for this? Maybe our detection of Netscape isn't working or something. It would be interesting to know what they changed to break the menus.

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Kjata
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Joined: 10 Oct 2000
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Location: USA

PostPosted: Mon Mar 10, 2003 1:39 am   
 
They don't work since Netscape 6.0

Now, I'm going to tell you why they don't work, but you are not going to like it. The reason is that Netscape finally conforms to standards, while IE and versions of Netscape before version 6 don't.

The first thing is that the menu uses the existance of document.all to detect IE versions and document.layers to detect Netscape versions. Since none of these objects exist in Netscape 6+, the menu fails early on.

As per the World Wide Web Consortium's specification of DOM Level 1, the scripting language (JavaScript 1.5/ECMAScript-262 in this case) needs to call the getElementById method of the HTMLDocument object to get the specified object and modify its attributes. Here is an example of an implementation using getElementById taken from Netscape's DevEdge site which should work on standards compliant browsers.

The bad news is that providing support for Netscape 6+ would require adding a third scenario in the browser checks where it looks for the precense of document.getElementById and acts accordingly. The good news is that someday when all browsers comply with the standards (right about when the sun starts rising in the west), this will be the only code needed.

Kjata
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Castaway
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Joined: 10 Oct 2000
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Location: Swindon, England

PostPosted: Mon Mar 10, 2003 8:46 am   
 
Just a hint.. They've never worked in Opera either (I mentioned it somewhen) - Operas pretty conform to, so there ya go ;)

Lady C.
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Kjata
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Joined: 10 Oct 2000
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 10, 2003 2:11 pm   
 
Well, I've decided to throw together the part for supporting getElementById. I've modified master.css and js_dynMenuFunctions.js to include support for this. Tested with Netscape 7 and IE 6 and it seems to work fine. Can't test with Netscape 4 since I don't have it anymore, but I didn't modify any part of that code so it should still work as before.

Since I don't remember your e-mail restrictions, tell me what should I do? Is zipping them ok?

Oh, and while you are changing that, perhaps "zMUD Scripts" could be changed to "Finished MUD Scripts" as discussed in another thread. This would, hopefully, lower the amount of people that incorrectly post questions in that forum.

Kjata
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Zugg
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Joined: 25 Sep 2000
Posts: 23379
Location: Colorado, USA

PostPosted: Mon Mar 10, 2003 7:18 pm   
 
Woot! Kjata, you are a life saver. I knew the menus didn't work with Opera and stuff, but I just didn't have the time or knowlege to mess with it.

Go ahead and put them into a zip file and email them to me. As long as attachments are not EXE files and are less than 5 MB then they should get through the mail gateway just fine.

And yes, "Finished MUD Scripts" is what I was going to change it to when I got a chance.

Just been too busy working on bugs. Some of these are taking a long time to fix. I guess I've gotten down to the really obscure bugs. Still have about 15 to go.

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Kjata
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 10, 2003 8:13 pm   
 
E-mail sent.

Kjata
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Zugg
MASTER


Joined: 25 Sep 2000
Posts: 23379
Location: Colorado, USA

PostPosted: Wed Mar 12, 2003 5:36 am   
 
Hmm, I haven't seen anything yet. Try sending it to sales@zuggsoft.com. That address doesn't have any filtering at all.

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Kjata
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PostPosted: Wed Mar 12, 2003 1:23 pm   
 
Ok, sent again.

Kjata
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Zugg
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Joined: 25 Sep 2000
Posts: 23379
Location: Colorado, USA

PostPosted: Fri Mar 14, 2003 12:32 am   
 
Woohoo! I've installed the files that Kjata sent me, and they seem to still work with IE. Could some people test this with Netscape 6/7 and with Opera? Let's cross our fingers!

And a BIG THANKS to Kjata for his work on this. All I had to do is replace a couple files on the site with the stuff that he edited, and it worked like a charm. That's a HUGE help to me and I'm sure everyone using other browsers will appreciate it.

(I also changed zMUD Scripts to Finished Scripts forum).

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Kjata
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PostPosted: Fri Mar 14, 2003 2:32 am   
 
Cool.

Tested with Netscape 7 and it works great.

By the way, the link to the AC Explorer Forum is the same as the one for zExplorer. Should zExplorer have it's own forum? Or perhaps after AC Explorer is deprecated its forum will become zExplorer's forum?

Kjata
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Castaway
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Joined: 10 Oct 2000
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Location: Swindon, England

PostPosted: Fri Mar 14, 2003 8:37 am   
 
Sorry, still doesn't work in Opera 6.05 .. I'll have to try 7, thats supposed to be better at such stuff (but has a horrible hotlist/bookmark thingy, in my opinion..)

Just to clarify, what am I supposed to get? Menus that drop down when the mouse hovers over them? (I get something wierd when Opera pretends to be IE, in Opera or Netscape mode, I dont get them at all..)

Lady C.
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Kjata
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Joined: 10 Oct 2000
Posts: 4379
Location: USA

PostPosted: Fri Mar 14, 2003 1:45 pm   
 
Well, after another good old fashioned kludge, we now have Opera support! I've already sent the updated file to Zugg.

I don't know why it didn't work on Opera 6, perhaps it doesn't support document.getElementById. Opera 7 does appear to support it, but it also suports document.all which brings a whole new level of problems into the scene since IE6 also supports getElementById (in addition to document.all), but for some reason the heights in IE6 do not match exactly those in Netscape or Opera. So, what I did was make Opera work using IE's method (using document.all) and adjusted the sizes accordingly if the user has Opera.

What all this means is that the menu should work under Opera 6 with IE emulation, and under Opera 7. However, it would be prefered if document.getElementById is used instead of document.all, but this would only happen if Opera decides to remove support for document.all

Kjata
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Zugg
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Joined: 25 Sep 2000
Posts: 23379
Location: Colorado, USA

PostPosted: Fri Mar 14, 2003 7:13 pm   
 
I've installed the new file from Kjata with the Opera "fix". Let us know how it works.

And yes, the way it should work is that you'll get a menu when you hover the mouse over one of the buttons in the button bar.

On the zExplorer/ACExplorer forum...once zExplorer has all of the features of AC Explorer, then yes, AC Explorer will go away and the forum will get renamed to just the zExplorer forum. Right now they are two different programs, but they share the same license, so they are the same "product" as far as Zuggsoft is concerned. The discussion topics heavily overlap, and the zExplorer discussion helps AC Explorer users to understand the new program. So it makes a lot of sense to keep them together for now.

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Zugg
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Joined: 25 Sep 2000
Posts: 23379
Location: Colorado, USA

PostPosted: Fri Mar 14, 2003 7:17 pm   
 
Nope, the latest file broke IE. I'm getting "Done, but with errors on page" in the status bar.

Reverting back to the previous javascript file for now.

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Castaway
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PostPosted: Sat Mar 15, 2003 1:32 am   
 
Hmm.. appears to be working with Opera 6.12 / Linux :)

Lady C.
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Kjata
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 17, 2003 12:47 am   
 
I also get the "Done, but with errors on page" message. It appears that it was a missing semi-color. There is a line that says:
var gstrBrowserType = null

which should be:
var gstrBrowserType = null;

After changing that, I don't get the error anymore. However, since Castaway mentioned that it worked with Opera 6.12, I decided to not do include Opera support the way I originally thought. Instead, I am going to let everyone that supports getElementByID use that method except IE6 since the sizes do not match correctly.

As usual, I've sent the corrected file to Zugg.

Kjata
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Castaway
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Joined: 10 Oct 2000
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Location: Swindon, England

PostPosted: Mon Mar 17, 2003 9:01 am   
 
Ah, working with 6.05 (windows) too.. lovely job :)

Lady C.
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Castaway
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Joined: 10 Oct 2000
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Location: Swindon, England

PostPosted: Mon Mar 17, 2003 9:06 am   
 
While I'm at it, I have another piece of wierd behaviour in Opera 6.05 (Windows)

When I write a post, and post it, I get the 'Thank you for your ..' screen, and it doesn't jump automatically back to showing the thread.. (It does on Linux tho..)

On the other hand, I think it used to with an older version, maybe this one is just broken.

Lady C.
*wishes they'd get v7 right so she can use it*
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Zugg
MASTER


Joined: 25 Sep 2000
Posts: 23379
Location: Colorado, USA

PostPosted: Mon Mar 17, 2003 7:10 pm   
 
Was still getting "Errors on page" and clicking on the menus were not working with the new files, so I've again had to restore the previous js_dynMenuFunctions.js file.

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Kjata
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Joined: 10 Oct 2000
Posts: 4379
Location: USA

PostPosted: Mon Mar 17, 2003 8:16 pm   
 
Since the other change was done, the old js_dynMenuFunctions.js file is the correct one. So it seems that everything is as it should be right now.

Kjata
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