On IE actually you should setup the class on an element with that structure:

element.setAttribute('className', 'my-class');

If there’s a flash movie into your page using the AMF protocol to speak with the other part of the site, there may be a bug under Internet Explorer version 6 … again. The AMF protocol stands for Action Message Format is simply JavaScript – Actionscript way to get connected. And it simply registers the callbacks from both sides. So there’s simply a object/embed pair in the HTML and a Flash movie using AMF, and IE6. Everything’s OK until leaving the page. On unload the window object the generated JavaScript code breaks and throws an error. Usually it’s something like that:

function __flash__removeCallback(instance, name) {
    ... here instance is given null under IE6
}

What if embed with some js library (SWFObject)

Reading some forum posts it may be working if I was using a js/flash library such as SWFObject, but I don’t want such, because of one another JavaScript file loading and blocking the content. I just wanted the object/embed to be in my page.

Easy to find a solution – difficult to set it up

Beside the well known fact that this instance is null and there’s an error, I couldn’t make

if (instance == null) escape this case ...

because it’s a Flash Player generated source, which is untouchable.

The clear way to the working site

Well on unload of the window object you must remove all the object/embed that’s giving the problem simply by adding that chunk of code:

1. if (document.getElementById(id_of_the_flash_container) != null) {
2.    $(window).unload(function() {
3.         document.getElementById(id_of_the_flash_container).removeChild(document.getElementById(id_of_the_object_tag));
4.    });
5. }

just replace both id_of_the_flash_container, which is some kind of a DIV tag, or other DOM element, and id_of_the_object_tag.

frameborder=”0″ attribute

<iframe frameborder=”0″ … ></iframe> is helping

Recently I wrote an article about the Google Adsense problem with page load blocking and than the solution was simple and elegant. You must put your ad in a separate .html file and to include it into your page with an iframe. That gives the page the ability to “breath” and to load faster.

You can see the entire article here.

When everything’s OK, wait for the IE

Yes as usual every browser loaded the iframe correclty, except … IE. Both 6 and 7. What was the problem of that lovely browser? Just as I mentioned in my previous article, I put the Google generated code chunk in a .html file and include it with an iframe.

So far so good. But was actually stoped in on IE. All the developer plugins of IE were incapable of helping me.

Finally the solution

The solution itself is so strange and stupid. The file you include your ad banner should be named “index”. If you have three ads on your page, and three iframes you must include three index.html files, obviously from different directories. That finally made IE working as the other world.

The task can be described as it is. There’s a Flex 3 DateChooser component integrated with a custom timeline component. The problem occurs when exporting the data from the flash to the browser. Than I write the unix timestamp to the url of the browser. Of course I’m using date.getTime() in Flex.

getTime()

Applying getTime() to any object of type Date in Flex results in a unix timestamp with included milliseconds. Of course the server side technology which in our case is PHP should devide by 1000 to remove the milliseconds.

The problem

The database and the server side script language use a UTC dates. The problem is the Flash functions getFullYear, getMonth, etc. don’t deal with UTC. Of course you can switch to getUTCFullYear, getUTCMonth, etc. but than comes the real problem.

The DateChooser …

When you’re using dates in Flex with no UTC in mind everything’s OK. You have the DateChooser component. Clicking on the 16th of May 2009 results in

Alert.show(date.toString());

which prints 16th of May 2009, which appears to be OK. Yes but the date.getTime() is still using the non-UTC time. If you’re using UTC, and suddenly print that kind of a message:

Alert.show(date.toUTCString());

Then for 16th of May 2009 you receive 15th of May 2009. Which is really bad.

No workaround

Unfortunately I didn’t find any workaround till now. I hope I’ll soon.

Zend_Date is the Zend Framework module for manipulation of dates. It gives several advantages. Everybody how has dealed with dates knows that built in PHP date function cannot manage dates before 1901. With that kind of problems Zend_Date is pretty fine.

How to do that

If you have only

Zend_Date::set($timestamp);

is not enough. The timestamp is an int representation and the framework cannot get the timezone from that and trows an error.

The simple way to solve the problem

Replace the line above with these:

$date = new Zend_Date($timestamp);

$date->setTimezone(‘Europe/Paris’);

print $date->toString(‘d M y’);

Now everything should be in place.

When the HSlider is set up with two or more thumbs there’s a gap between them always. The problem is that you may want to put them on one single value of the slider, but it’s not possible.

First: hide your thumbs

The quick solution is to make custom skin for the thumbs, setup the height and width of the thumb to be 1px and make a transparent background image for skinning them. That of course does not solve the problem. There’s still gap of 1 value between the thumbs, and still you cannot select one single value with both of them.

Make your own thumbs

It’s difficult to make the calculation and positioning of course. With that approach you’ve to be careful with the math to adjust properly the new thumbs. They can be some kind of Flex built in component. As the button control is or whatever.

Hope for workaround

As it appears there’s a reported bug for this issue. And I hope soon there will be a workaround or even better there’s going to be new version. Something I don’t like in commercial software.

Well it may look strange to want to do that exaclty. Who wants to have a <a> tag in another. It really looks semanticaly incorrect, but however, every normal A grade browser’s displaing it correctly, except .. IE6.

The Case

The Microsoft team may be too much semanticaly involved in that problem, I should guess, but that’s really impossible.

The Workaround

The workaround is trivial. You just put the <a> tags one after another and adjust them with relative position and margin with negative values.

… and The Example

<a href=”#”>link here</a>

<a href=”#” style=”margin:-10px 0 0; position : relative;”>link there</a>

As it appears if you have flash embed / object tags in a div which is initaly hidden (style=”display:none”) cannot be loaded. It means the .swf file is loaded via HTTP but when the div become visible then starts the loading process and the flash starts from the begining.

Is there a workaround?

I’m looking for a workaround which I’ll share as soon as I find it. If you have a solution please share it with us.