this, that, and the other thing

As I mentioned yesterday, helpful fellow Mootoolers pointed out a nasty bug in the expanding menu application. This particular bug, which caused the entire menu structure to essentially freeze itself in a fully expanded state, seemed to affect earlier versions of Firefox. One nice coder mentioned Firefox 2.0.0.13, so I downloaded and installed this earlier version and went to work.

Once I had figured out what was going on, the fix was simple: all I had to do was change a class declaration in the main stylesheet. Specifically, I changed “display:inline-block” to “display:block.” Voila, problem solved. So what happened and why did my simple fix straighten it out? Well, menu text in my application demo is enclosed within a span tag, which in the stylesheet had been given the “display:inline-block” declaration. The reason for this is that the javascript has to take the height of this element and use it in the calculations.

The problem was, the earlier Firefox version didn’t understand inline-block and just dropped the declaration altogether. So by the time my span height was used in the code it arrived as NaN (”Not a Number”). Not surprisingly, the code bombed from that point on.

The funny thing is, I can’t remember why I used “display:inline-block” in the first place, instead of plain old “display:block.”

A couple of helpful fellow Mootoolers over at the MooForum let me know about a bug in my Mootools-based expanding menu program. The bug appears to be limited to earlier (pre-3.0) versions of FireFox.

What happens in these earlier versions is that all the menu items simultaneously open in fully expanded mode … obviously what should not happen. I think the bug may center on declarations in the stylesheet. Anyway, we’ll see.

Ah, the joys of cross-browser compatibility (sigh). I’ll get to work on it. Once it’s fixed, I’ll make a new entry and explain what I did to fix it.