Re: Need advice on reliable way to identifyIE asthe browser

[vhamberg@xxxxxxxxxxx]

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.