DHTML Dynomat: Hierarchical Menus Version 3.x: Revision 2 Notes

Hierarchical Menus Version 3.x
Dynomat Tool: Revision 2

Notes

Revision 2 of the Dynomat Tool for Hierarchical Menus Version 3.x improves on Revision 1 in these areas:

Transfer (copying) of created code to system clipboard.

Revision 1 tried to be cool by not using the standard cut-and-paste-from-a-TEXTAREA for the generated code. It made use of the IE textRange object to gather the information in the background and copy it automatically to the system clipboard.

That worked fine. But it insisted on being even cooler, and did the copying when the user exited the tool.

Even that worked fine...except for some very vocal users.

The problem was extremely difficult to reproduce, but in the end we did it. Although the code made it to the clipboard, when IE exited it erased the clipboard, under conditions which we have not traced, leaving some users with no tool, no code, and an instance of NotePad running with no Paste command active.

Revision 2 still copies to the clipboard for you, but without exiting the tool. A new COPY to Clipboard button is always available to copy code as-you-go. The Exit button now, simply, exits.

Adaptation for IE5

Internet Explorer 5 improved on, and in many cases, changed for the better, many rendering quirks of IE4.

It has modified behaviour for the text-align and visibility CSS properties. It places absolutely positioned elements, that lack a user-specified left and top property differently. It renders IFRAMEs that have a overflow:scroll property with double scrollbar space allotment. (I don't know if this one qualifies as an improvement)

In short, IE4 allowed for sloppy scripting. IE5 has tightened it up. A few parts of the 4000 line Revision 1 were, it seems, sloppy, but it rendered fine in IE4. These parts have now been tidied up, and both versions of Explorer use the same code and render it the same way.

The script could have been "optimized" for IE5, but then we would end up with if...else statements and a much longer script.

Use of the system colors.

This is a purely cosmetic enhancement. The tool now displays in whatever color scheme you have chosen in your Desktop Properties, giving it more of an application look. How this is done is documented in column 24: Accessing the User-Defined System Colors

Omission of deprecated property

The Hierarchical Menu script no longer uses the NS-only showVisited parameter variable, which was deprecated in version 3.06. It has, therefore, been omitted from the code the tool generates.

Use of the onbeforeunload event handler

The tool now uses the onbeforeunload handler, discussed in DHTML Diner, to remind users to copy to the clipboard before exiting. The chance is given to return to the tool without losing any code created