Tech Note: Internet Explorer 'Adjustments'

Mon, May 26, 2008 at 6:39:35 pm PDT

Actually, they’re “regressions,” not “adjustments.” Versions 6 and 7 of Internet Explorer have bugs that prevent our new comment reporting and user profile features from working correctly; it appears that these versions of IE get very cranky if you try to create an IFRAME via Javascript that fills the entire page, when the page is larger than a certain size. (This is necessary to create the user interface “blocking” effect.) In our comments threads, we seem to hit the limit at around 200 comments. At that point, the background turns black instead of graying out, and I’ve even had IE6 crash on some longer threads. Ooch.

Those features are now disabled for Internet Explorer; if you click a user’s icon you’ll see the old familiar profile page in a new window. If you click the exclamation point icon to report a comment, you won’t get the choice to ‘Recommend’ it.

So the features still work in IE, they’re just not as majestic. This is called “degrading gracefully.” If you use Firefox, Safari, or any other browser, you can still breathe in the majesty.

For now, the spinoff link exclamation points still use the new Javascript reporting method; it gets slow in Internet Explorer, but doesn’t have the same problems as the long comment threads.

And by the way, I’ve also been Ajaxifying the administration back end, and not to blow my own trumpet or anything but it’s getting really really cool. I can now edit any front page entry in place, set its options (comments on/off, spinoff link auto-open, Digg JS link, etc.), title, tags, and more without ever reloading the page.