When a Form's Not Really a Form

February 15, 2006 by Eric Richardson

When's a form not really a form? When it's being used and abused the way HTML forms have to be to do interesting work these days.

Over the past few weeks forms have been out to get me. You wouldn't think that would be. I mean, forms are pretty simple stuff. You put in some fields, there's a submit action, and boom there you go.

If only life were so simple. — Continue Reading...

A Sort of Todo List for the Blog

February 13, 2006 by Eric Richardson

So I've definitely been neglecting this blog lately. Lots of cool things going on that I promise I'll get to talk about soon. So far either they just a) haven't launched yet or b) have meant enough work that I haven't had time for writing.

Some things I intend to blog about soon:

• My third (and this time successful) attempt with Ruby on Rails
• Purchasing and Colocating a server for work
• Using javascript to create stylable select boxes
• Version control likes and dislikes

I'll try to make it soon.

Life Doesn't Make Sense

February 08, 2006 by Eric Richardson

Here's the kind of thing that makes people want to not get into web development: I have an app I'm working on, and part of it relies on a pretty tightly spaced interface containing form elements, particularly select boxes. Select boxes are a pain because unlike most everything else, they just can't be styled. That's not cool. So to fix that problem I wrote a javascript library that runs through a page and replaces all the select boxes with easily-stylable unordered lists that function like selects. That's a bit of a challenge, but easy enough to solve.

So I now have ul's, and I style them to look like drop-down select boxes. In Safari and Firefox it works perfectly. In IE, though, the text of the select options magically appears below where the select would have been. If you open the select, they disappear and function correctly, but then they pop back right afterward.

After spending all morning tracking down what exactly could be triggering this, it turns out to be something just as illogical as you might expect. — Continue Reading...