From Accessibility to Zope

I finished updated my brother’s blog over New Year, and I’m now quite happy with it. I spent ages on a graphical title block in Inkscape. I’m not totally satisfied with the caricatures who are a little more cartoony than I would have liked. The new theme is based on K2, which I do think is pretty.

I had a strange bug with the Google Maps on the gallery which I found after a bit of searching was caused by Google Maps not supporting embedding within XHTML. But I’m pleased that the thumbnailing/unthumbnailing works so well. Previously the map enlarged and reduced; this is much less intrusive in either state.

I did have to disable all of K2’s shiny Javascript features to make it work with my Javascript (for map markers) But they were a UI disaster anyway. One of the advantages to JS over Flash is that it allows us not to create horrific new UI paradigms. So going to great lengths to do so is missing the point.

If anyone’s keeping score, I’ve found my first snippet of code which IE7 handles flawlessly but FF2 does not.

It’s code for creating multiple recipient email fields with Javascript, such that creates as many as necessary and keeps the last field spare. Specifically this code is for deleting fields, which happens when you backspace or delete from a field which you’ve already emptied. This is modelled on how Thunderbird/Icedove’s compose window behaves.

function autoCompleteContact(e)
{
    var event=(window.event)?window.event:e;
    var target=(window.event)?window.event.srcElement:e.target;

    //catch backspace or delete on an empty field as deleting the field
    if (target.value == '' && (e.keyCode == 8 || e.keyCode == 46))
    {
        //don't delete the last field if it's empty
        if (target == recips[recips.length -1])
            return;

        //find the container element for all recipient input fields
        var recips_container=document.getElementById('recipients');
        if (!recips_container) return;

        //Javascript doesn't seem to provide an array remove()
        //so do effectively newrecips=recips.remove(target) manually
        var newrecips=new Array;
        for (var i=0; i < recips.length; i++)
        {
            if (recips[i] != target)
                newrecips.push(recips[i]);
        }

        //Don't remove the last field
        if (newrecips.length > 0)
        {
            recips_container.removeChild(target);
            recips=newrecips;
        }

        //Focus the last field
        recips[recips.length-1].focus();
    }

    ...

IE7 does it perfectly, FF2’s layout breaks and it starts showing the contents of the INPUT elements in the wrong place.