[thelist] [tip] Mac IE doctype/dynamic styles

Sat Mar 23 19:31:01 CST 2002

This started out as a frustrated question, but turned into a tip:

<tip type="Mac IE 5 doctype and dynamic styles" author="Erik Mattheis">

Mac IE is picky about dynamically set styles when you use a strict or
any XHTML doctype declaration.

With the doctype <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01
Transitional//EN"> (or no doctype), you can set styles using a number
or string with or without units specified:

document.getElementById('id').style.height = 72;
document.getElementById('id').style.height = '72';
document.getElementById('id').style.height = '72px';

And you can set colors with or without the pound sign:

document.getElementById('id').style.backgroundColor = 'ffffff';
document.getElementById('id').style.backgroundColor = '#ffffff';

All work fine.

But with a strict HTML 4 or any XHTML doctype:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0//EN"
	"http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/strict.dtd">
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
      "DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN">
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
	"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

You have to set the value of styles as strings with units specified:

document.getElementById('id').style.height = '72px';

And must use the pound sign for colors:

document.getElementById('id').style.backgroundColor = '#ffffff';

Not doing so results in an "Invalid procedure call or argument" error.

</tip>
--

__________________________________________
- Erik Mattheis

(612) 377 2272
http://goZz.com/

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