Absolute positioned divs problem on IE

There seems to be a problem on displaying an absolute positioned dives inside a an absolute positioned divs. It seems that ie only renders the portion of the internal div within the confine of the container divs, setting overflow to visible on both divs stil result to nothing. the only solution is to have a bigger div for the container div with no background.

SVG – The standard that nobody use or care about.

Have you heard about SVG? .. Have you see any page that are using SVG? .. Better yet have you ever develop anything that uses SVG? ..

Most people will gave up on the first question, some will stop at two and there will be very very few that can say yes to three. Well I’m one of the unlucky few who decided to develop something with SVG. Why I ended up with SVG, simple reason, that it is free.

The other similiar technology are flash and silverlight. Well flash, chances are your browsers are already installed with the latest flash drivers. Since this is a comercial product the support and documentation must be swell. Downside, well you have to pay for it (Adobe AIR), it used actionscript (i’m not into language that is single purpose). Silverlight is in a way free, the fact that it is XML (just like svg) means I can just wrote something in vb and spew out silverlight media, it is also faster that SVG. On the downside, last time I checked no right click (just like flash; context menu is their own), something is not wright about the textblock, no arbitrary size text box, .

So I basically ended up with SVG just because it is the freest of them all. It has bad support, somehow slower as the drawing gets bigger and more complex, supported on most browser (ie need adobe SVG) , its in XML so I can literally  write my drawing.

1st browser support. Except for IE, the other modern browsers have their own intenal SVG engine. For ie we need the Adobe SVG plugin. All of the internal SVG renderer performs poorly in term of speed, compared to the Adobe SVG. But the best one by far to me was Google Chrome. This could also be the fact that Chrome have the best Javascript engine. With firefox being the worst. Safari so-so.

Adobe SVG plugin, is the best solution to render svg images on screen, and it works on all browsers. But the ironic part is that it only work best with IE. The reason being on all the other browsers, the browsers can’t have access to the SVG Dom through getSVGDocument;. Without this each svg rendered with adobe SVG in firefox, safari or chrome are being confined to themselves. Event and action cannot be passed back and forth between HTML DOM and SVG DOM. Which blows. Even worser is that Adobe is pulling the plug on SVG this coming January (2009). What’s the point of having SVG anymore when they already have Macromedia.

While doing this I also realised that you cannot uninsall a plugin in Chrome,. How aa? Since chrome has the best internal SVG renderer I decided to revert back to the original renderer. Hmm not much can be found in the option page. Tried about:plugins and it register adobe SVG as a plugin. So I tried uninstalling Adobe SVG, run chrome again about:plugins Adobe SVG is still listed. Hmm Chrome you sir is a true beta.

So SVG is in a sad state. Major browser are pledging support with sub-par engine. The best engine Adobe SVG is about to be pulled from the intenet. Ive picked the wrong technology.

innerHTML vs DOM

There has been a lot of argument on the net with regards to innerHTML and DOM. Most of the argument ended up with mentioning innerHTML is not cool but it gets the job done very fast. I’m for one a believer of innerHTML, why write ten lines of codes when you can sum everything into a string and dump it anywhere.

But on my attempt to put multiple iframe within a page I realised that everytime I add new content with innerHTML (this is on ie),  the whole node in centext will be parsed again and each image and objects were being reloaded again. This problem will not obvious be obvious at first especially on a lite page. But some of the iframe that I was working with contains sizeable svg object. So by adding a new object to the body tag (which could probably be another svg object) thorugh innerHTML I realised that ie will reload the last item and loads the new item. This will go on when a third item is added it will reload the last two svg and load the new one. And on

I’ve tried to look for an answer on how innerHTML actually works, but came with no answer. Most of the discussion on the net is on the comparison between DOM and innerHTML.

The funny thing is that when using a proper DOM technique the problem was gone completely. But if you ask me about innerHTML vs DOM, I would go “try innerHTML first then do DOM”.

IE z-index problem on multiple iframe.

Noticed that IE is displaying wrong stack order of multiple iframe that resides in multiple div. The stacking order is being displayed perfectly in Chrome and Firefox. Maybe this has something to do with the fact that all of these iframe content are using the same resources and id.

Update: Realized that this is also got something to do with ie transperency, by setting the body transperency of each document that is placed within the iframe to a value, the problem seems to be fixed.

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This page will serve as my notepad. I’ll try to log my finding on the development of EALIS Seek here. The technology in context is the basic html, javascript, iis/asp/vb, mssql,  svg & web browsers.

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