Two bugs down in DD_roundies this weekend…

Made some progress yesterday on DD_roundies.  I have been kicking around the removeVML() and rerender() functions that I added a while ago; they’re working well.  I’m feeling safe about a release soon — I’ve been on the fence, sure one moment but startled by something new within short order.

One bug was that disabled form fields don’t fire _any_ event at all, ever.  Even onreadystatechange, it doesn’t fire on an element that you set to disabled=true.  I changed where the VML gets inserted… which has a few ramifications I’ll cover later.

Second, I stumbled upon a solution for the problem where a roundified link ends up only being clickable on the actual text of the link (clicks wouldn’t register on the padding around the text, if it existed).  I _think_ the almost-ready code will handle the problem by itself, but it needs some testing before I go ahead and call it a fact.

What to expect of DD_roundies 0.0.3 and IE8

1. It’s going to work. I had the good fortune of being able to pull out some kludges specific to IE8 RC1, which is, as we know, no longer relevant.
2. The roundies aren’t going to show up immediately. Period. IE8 doesn’t support CSS expressions anymore, so there is going to be, at the very least, the wait for onDomReady to complete.

Bug reporting etiquette

I’m way, way, WAY behind on responding to bug reports.  I’ll only partially apologize; I feel bad that I can’t always help a fellow out, and it’s been months since I’ve responded to some people, but I have significantly less willingness to write experimental code during these beautiful summer days.

With that in mind, if you’ve found a problem with either DD_roundies or DD_belatedPNG (there are many), don’t email me code snippets or anecdotes. I want a full example of the malign behavior you’re seeing, in the form of a URL or an archive (.zip, .rar, .tgz, your preference).

I try to answer all email promptly and thoughtfully, but the volume has gotten to be a bit too much to manage.

To those of you who ask, “Does belatedPNG support background-repeat?” – don’t be that guy, read the docs, see the examples, or try it yourself.

To those of you who report bugs found in some online testing suite (such as BrowserShots) or multiple-IE-versions type software, I am plainly uninterested.  I use VirtualBox with a Windows guest, and have found that approach to be very accurate.

belatedPNG / IMG nodes / Javascript event handling

I have noted in the past in known issues that, in order to not have to use a pixel GIF (a practice I find annoying), I have to set IMG nodes to visibility:hidden.  This prevents any attached Javascript event handling from functioning as expected, because you can no longer, say, click on the IMG anymore.

Over email, I’ve answered inquiries about this with nothing better than using a pixel GIF workaround and moving the PNG image visibility to the parent as a background image.  Lame.

I’ve decided that 0.0.9a will simply copy all events bound to any fixed IMG nodes to the resulting visible VML, and will modify them slightly so that they fire in the scope of the IMG node as intended.  I estimate that will get around that catch-22.   One can hope, anyway.

DD_belatedPNG 0.0.8a released

Changelog here:

http://dillerdesign.com/experiment/DD_belatedPNG/#release0.0.8a

AND IT ONLY TOOK ME HALF A YEAR.  (Not really.)

I’m sure I missed credits for people.  Let me know.  Way too much email for me to keep up with.

Quick note on DD_roundies progress

Good news, I have had some time (and willingness … debugging IE is a pain) to actually sit down and write code.

DD_roundies 0.0.3 will feature two new methods:

• DD_roundies.removeVML( HtmlDomElement );
• DD_roundies.rerender( HtmlDomElement );

The former would be used if you wanted to un-roundify an explicit DOM node that you provide as the single argument to the method.

The latter would be used (same argument as the former) if the onpropertychange events didn’t catch all the changes that you intended to see, and you want to start the whole process of evaluating appearance and location over again.  It is also useful for roundifying elements after cloning an element, which hasn’t been working correctly up to this point.

Thoughts on upcoming releases of DD_roundies and DD_belatedPNG

I have an opportunity to do some hacking this weekend and the next, which should (frickin’ finally) yield some new public versions of each lib.  Each should have more than one fix present, particularly in light of the really solid public bug patches I’ve received over email (thank you!).

Today, I found out the hard way that DD_roundies (and by inference, I suspect DD_belatedPNG as well) really hates HTTPS traffic and will cause ‘operation aborted’ errors in some cases (even though I’m NOT doing an appendChild to an unfinished element).  I conjured a solution, nonsensical as it may be… I suppose that is fitting, given that the PNG lib in particular is nonsense to begin with.

Anyway, I’m looking for some feedback, on one idea in particular: both libs require the silent addition of invisible image elements to a given page to determine the sizes of all images that get applied to VML elements.  I, and pretty much anyone who has used DD_belatedPNG to a great degree, have noticed significant initial page load lagging when using that lib.  I suspect it is in part because of the addition of the above mentioned “size-finding” images.

How would you feel about the lib requiring you to add an object literal that would inform the lib of how big the image sizes are… sort of like a configuration object?

This would enable me to skip the whole size-finding bit.  However, it sounds like a pain in the butt.  A compromise: if no config object is detected, the lib runs the size-finding bit once, and spits out a config object in form of some javascript code that can be copied out of a textarea.

Even if it doesn’t save much CPU time, it would at least prevent the need to download a given image twice just to display it once.

(curse words)

I’ve been a busy boy lately.  Still.  Thankfully, I’ve met a deadline as of noon Tuesday March 24th, and I’ll have more time to field comments, and hopefully write some patches.  Sounds crazy, no?  I haven’t even downloaded IE8 public yet.

Need a few days off first though.  Sorta burnt out.

IE8 RC1: slightly better

I installed IE8 RC1 in a VM this evening, and looked at a yet-unreleased rough version of DD_roundies 0.0.3a.  Images still fail to load, but the onresize event works!  Rendering the VML also “feels” faster, like there isn’t so much of a browser freeze.

Drew hasn’t disappeared.

I know a lot of you are waiting for various bug fixes for both DD_roundies and DD_belatedPNG.  I have had very little free time lately.

I did see that IE8 RC1 is being offered, which has me eager to look at it in the context of DD_roundies (FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DID THEY FIX THE ONRESIZE EVENT?).

Hold tight folks, I’m still dealing with a healthy dose of Too Much Sh** Going On.