I just decided to celebrate the sale of a commercial license for my tree menu script pureDOMexplorer by creating a new version, which fulfils the change requests I had in the past. The new version of pde now

• turns a nested list with the class “pde” into a tree menu – which means you can use it more than once on a page
• uses fully unobtrusive JavaScript, including addEvent and encapsulation of all functionality in one pde object.
• creates collapse and expand links and allows the section links to link to a landing page
• allows for both keyboard and mouse to expand the sections (I still have to fix the tabbing issue over hidden elements)
• keeps all the look and feel in the CSS - you don’t need to know JavaScript to change the look and feel
• does not collapse lists that contain a STRONG element – to allow for a “you are here” state in your trees.

You can check and see the new version at the new pureDOMExplorer demo page

Now, it all works fine in MSIE/Opera/Firefox on PC, but on Safari I cannot make the hiding and showing to work without resorting to the inaccessible display block/none solution.

Currently my demo CSS uses the “Off Left” technique, as recommended to be most accessible :


/* The class to hide nested ULs */
.hide{
position:absolute;
top:0;
left:-4000px;
width:1px;
}

/* The class to show nested ULs */
.show{
position:relative;
top:0;
left:0;
width:auto;
}

Update
Ingo Chao took on the challenge and fixed the Safari issue. All working fine now.

Update
Following the requests in the comments to make the parent link also collapse and expand the nested list, I changed the script and added a new parameter called linkParent. If the parameter is false the parent link will point to the document it links to, if it is true, it will collapse and expand the same way the arrows do.

Jeff Han is doing some research on Bi-manual, multi-point, and multi-user interactions on a graphical interaction surface and watching the 17MB demo reel got me hooked on the idea. The accessibility of it of course is not mentionable, but how cool would it be to sort your digital pictures by dragging them with your finger or even use this interface for card sorting exercises resulting in an XML sitemap?

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.

Google have released some statistics on web pages they have analysed:

In December 2005 we did an analysis of a sample of slightly over a billion documents, extracting information about popular class names, elements, attributes, and related metadata. The results we found are available below. We hope this is of use!

I would very much say so, so have a read about Google code webstats

Another Firefox extension I hadn’t known of earlier is Firebug which put together the best of JS console and the DOM inspector and even shows you your XMLhttpRequest data!

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.