It is bad practice to rely on the maxlength attribute of form fields to ensure the real length of entered data. That much I knew, as playing with curl made me aware how vulnerable forms are on the wild wild web.

However, I was a bit agog when I realised that it is possible to change the value of a field to a word longer than maxlength on MSIE and Opera.

I set up a demo that shows how to override maxlength with JavaScript .

So, don’t trust maxlength, make sure to also check the real length on the server side.

A friend of mine asked for a menu like the Outlook Panel in CSS and JavaScript as a proof of concept. I took on the challenge and quickly put together this example of a DOMscripting powered panel menu . It functions the same way – only one section can be open at a time – and should be rather self-explanatory. For a change I am not using off-left to hide the sections but plain old display block and none inside the script, which has the welcome side effect that you can use it with a keyboard without having to tab through the invisible links!

Features:

• Fully contained unobtrusive JavaScript
• Option to style JavaScript and non-JavaScript menu independently
• Option to have predefined open section

I hope it is helpful for some of you, and I appreciate any feedback / bug issues.

Microsoft (no, I will not link this one) have shipped a beta of Internet Explorer 7 . It looks quite funky and requires XP SP2 to run. The catch is that it actually replaces your old MSIE6 (hey we all want that), which can be a real issue for testing. You can install the MSIE6 standalone alongside, but allegedly this might cause problems.

Therefore it might be best to install the MSIE 7 standalone version instead.

As for taking the new shiny MSIE for a ride, there is a test case collection going on at the CSS discuss wiki.

I got asked to set this up as a proof of concept for an upcoming project, and it might be helpful to you guys, too:

Previewing collated form data with DOMscripting

The code is a bit wooly at the moment and I will clean it up and explain a bit more if I get the time.
In the meantime, just give it a swirl.

Following a thread on the evolt list about reading the next sibling element of a current element and making sure it really is an element and not a text node (line break), I decided to add a small helper object to my upcoming JavaScript book that takes care of some of these issues.

Give it a try: DOMhelp

My questions now are:

• Is that something that really can help save beginners frustration
  about different browsers and DOM oddities?
• Is it pretty bullet proof?
• can you think of other methods that should be in there?

I promise to add a greeting, should you come up with something I
forgot or find out I did wrong. I don’t get many free copies though…

:-)

I am aware that there are a lot of libraries already out there, but
most of them are just too massive to use in a beginner book.