Uploader refactoring and opacity

[Eli Cochran]

I've wrestled with this for a while, ever since I noticed that many  
web developers would use JS "get around" mark up in HTML that wasn't  
DTD compliant and therefor doesn't validate -- essentially hiding  
necessary but invalid markup by instantiating it using JS.

There is one other instance of this in the Uploader. We set the height  
of the file queue dynamically because browsers consistently get  
dynamically scrolling areas wrong, especially on table elements. In  
fact, that code is going to get messier because I still haven't made  
up for some IE bugs around this.

So the long and short of it is that crafty use of JS is the only way  
to do some of the things that we want to do. We work with what we have.

I do like your idea of doing it the W3C way in the markup, and then  
overriding it. Seems sensible.

- Eli

On May 12, 2008, at 8:00 AM, Colin Clark wrote:

> Hi Eli,
>
> Interesting problem...
>
> On 11-May-08, at 10:15 AM, Eli Cochran wrote:
>> There is some code in Progress that does some tweaking to the  
>> format of the Progress dialog. There is a comment there now that  
>> the code should be moved to CSS. The reason the code is there is to  
>> make up for problems in CSS.
>>
>> Specifically that the opacity setting is browser specific. We can  
>> put it in CSS (and many people do) but then the CSS file will not  
>> validate, so when dealing with CSS, I usually let jQuery deal with  
>> it and handle the browser foo.
>
> The general idea we were trying to encourage was that any appearance- 
> related settings are ideally expressed in CSS. Your point is that  
> opacity is specified in different ways depending on the browser.  
> What a drag!
>
> So it seems like we have two possible options:
>
> 1. Expose opacity as a optional parameter in the JavaScript
> 2. Specify opacity value within the CSS in the W3C format but  
> continue to use jQuery to actually set the value
>
> Any recommendations?
>
> Colin
>
> ---
> Colin Clark
> Technical Lead, Fluid Project
> Adaptive Technology Resource Centre, University of Toronto
> http://fluidproject.org
>

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Eli Cochran
user interaction developer
ETS, UC Berkeley