Technical Note: Spinoff Links vs. IE6
Charles Johnson
Fri Jan 11, 2008 at 5:22 pm PST • Views: 148
If you’re using Internet Explorer version 6, and you’ve been having problems with our spinoff links feature, I’m glad to announce that those IE6-related problems are now mostly debugged.
For the techies amongst us, the main reason for the problems was IE6’s annoying lack of support for the “selected” attribute of <option> elements. If you try to set that attribute you get one of those patented IE6 cryptic script errors. And since I’m dynamically reloading the category list with each refresh of the spinoff links areas, I need to set the selected option—especially in the top rated links area.
The solution is to set the “selectedIndex” attribute of the parent <select> element instead, to a zero-based index of the selected option’s position within the drop-down menu. Which sounds kind of gnarly, but actually was pretty easy to implement once I understood the source of the problem.
Luckily, Firefox and Safari also work with the “selectedIndex” method, because they know how to play well with others. Unlike that fershlugginer IE6.
Oh yes, about that “mostly debugged” part: there are still some non-critical display issues, because IE6 doesn’t correctly resize its <select> elements when they’re re-stuffed with <option> elements via Javascript. Still checking into that one.
Frank says: