The company that I work for asked me to develop a dynamic tree application, in which you could add, edit, and delete nodes. So after doing some research and a couple failed attempts using yahoo developer and dojo JavaScript tree libraries, I went with what I know (jQuery).

Let me say thanks to Jörn Zaefferer, for his jquery treeview plugin which gave me the framework for the working tree and Chris Domigan for his jquery contextMenu plugin which saved me from writing a right click popup menu with controls.

You can view and play around with my tree application here.

Keep in mind that this is just a javascript/jQuery demo of how the application works.

Sometimes you want to indent the options of a select element to display a tree or a hierarchy of items.

Example:
Original:                                              Text Indenting:



There are two indenting techniques that I am going to use here, because of "Cross Browser" related issues. Internet Explorer does recognize attributes or styles attached to the options of a select element whereas Firefox does allow it.

I still have not found an indenting technique for Safari, and if you find this to work or not work in your browser of choice. Let me know.

First I'm going to make this work for Firefox2 (Not tested in FF3).

My previous entries regarding Multiple Drop Down Menus were for a basic working model and designed to work with Internet Explorer 6 and Firefox 2.

After making some refinements and enhancing the functionality for use with Safari, I have come up with a better functioning model.

Safari was not performing properly when I was using the onclick event. I guess it's a design thing within Safari that does not work right with click events attached to select elements. So, the onclick event got replaced by onfocus. Also instead of using the html events for focus (onfocus), the event handling was handed over to jquery. They state on their site that the event handling with in jquery is some percent faster than using HTML events and it certainly shows.


So, now I shall write some code for all this.

If you need to pass one single $var from page to page, this would be the most simple of ways to do it using php. Which also results in very little code for handling it.

First create the url with the var attached. As so.

    http://www.yoursite.com?querystring

Notice there's no assignment using an equal sign as you'd normally do.(Like this)

    http://www.yoursite.com?str=querystring

Now we have to read the query string upon page change.

If you have one variable that you need to pass from one page to another via a query string, the simplest way to do it is to attach it to the url as "?querystring".

http://www.someplace.com?querystring.

There is no assignment needed as you would normally write by using the equals sign. For example: http://www.someplace.com?str=querystring.

If you want to remove a few lines of Javascript which would do the parsing of the returned string, this is the way to go. But keep in mind this is only beneficial if using one single variable.Otherwise I would do the whole assignment(name=value) and parsing of a querystring to keep things in order.

Now, if we had the url:

    http://www.someplace.com?querystring.

How would we get the value querystring?

I find myself using Safari(ver 3.0.4) on a PC more and more and shrugging off any IE(6 or 7) browser.

Safari is pretty nice. It's sleek looking, the color qualities and images look clear, and I like the way it displays form elements. With those features, since I am a Senior UI Developer and primarily develop the front end of applications, I needed to add Javascript handling to Safari which isn't defaulted to display errors or exceptions. It would be nice to have a Developers Kit, like what Firefox offers, but that's a far reach. Most code that I have written has worked great in Firefox and Safari, but this one time recently it was failing on me in Safari.

So to add Javascipt error catching in Safari on a PC. You have to open file Preferences.plist in a test editor.

I was reading an article on livescience.com about the internet having black holes. I would assume that since an article like this exists we all experience this occurrence, of requesting a website or page and waiting for the page to display, if it does.

It stated that a group of technologists are  researching the phenomenon to find the cause and locations, of these black holes as if somewhere in the network of wires connecting us all, there's a Bermuda triangle of sorts.

Maybe the answer is a bit more simple than a black hole, and that a simple request to a remote server gets lost and disappears.

A friend took a look my site today and sent me an email asking about the changes I have made to it. They said that they have been busy for quite sometime and hadn't checked in to see what I have been up to with this place or small corner of the(my) world.

That brought me back to when I first started this site 2 years ago. Huh, only 2 years ago, actually it's a few months less than that. Seems like so long ago. I guess I've been a busy.

So as it started, I had some space on myspace to learn and understand the hype about it and was pretty bored with it rather quickly. I'm still pretty bored with myspace and others like and don't see the purpose(I'll explain that another time). So I decided to write myself a little application for my myspace page(for fun) in my spare time. It was a simple newsreader application for sports headline news(specifically for the News Jersey Devils hockey club) that read in an xml file and displayed a headline and article text in rotation with a fade out between articles. It allowed a click on the headline to open a new window to read the full article.

Acid tests are the tests that browsers are put through to test basic web standards. To date there are 3 tests.

Named aptly:

    Acid1.
    Acid2.
    Acid3.

Acid 1 was first developed in 1998 by Todd Fahrner and was important in establishing a simple standard in early browser, especially related to CSS1 rendering and specs.

Acid 2 was released in April of 2005. This test is still being used to test CSS2 rendering and specs. Later that year in October, Safari 2.0.2 became the first browser to pass the test. Soon to follow was Opera and Konqueror. To no surprise IE has not past the test, but a big surprise is that FireFox, still has yet to get a passing grade. Although IE8 which is in Beta testing and FireFox 3 are both said to be close to passing.(We'll see).

Acid 2 test for these web standards:

Web Slices is a new and  pretty cool feature in the soon to be released IE8. Yes, I said IE8.

Anyway, Web Slices are like a small pop up div in a web page, that's called a Tool Tip. Except that a Web Slice does work in a Web page but, instead works on the browser.

We all have Web Sites that we visit a few or several times per day and have those sites bookmarked for easy. access. So instead of actually visiting the site you can click or hover over the bookmark in your browser to see what's new on that site. Any content can be in the Web Slice such as stock figures, Weather/Temp Reports, or the newest News Headlines. If you choose to visit the site then you can click on the Web Slice and go directly to the page that's serving up that content.

I have provided two Screen Shots of what I am trying to describe. A before and after.