Apparently this guy’s friends really didn’t like him.

While styling the toolbar for the text input, I found some strange behavior in Mozilla’s CSS selector code. The SelectORacle parses this properly: #bar > *:hover, but Mozilla doesn’t handle it. Strangely enough, if you specify the element, say, like #bar > strong:hover, it’ll work.

I’ve been really busy at work, so I originally missed seeing that a getSelection patch (bug 88049) had finally been checked into the latest nightlies. I’ve been waiting for this for over 2 years now, ever since I tried to implement the Blogger text-edit controls in an early milestone build of Mozilla (haha, I tried using window.getSelection(), silly me, why would I ever think that would return a selection?).

Now, here was where I was going to announce my triumphant victory. After all, it’s relatively simple to code, assuming the feature is working. And to that end, I’ve spent a few hours over the past few days whipping it up. But that little matter about the feature actually working? Well, it doesn’t really. With the current nightly builds, the ranging features die horribly when hard line-breaks are involved. Apparently, in those cases, the text nodes are represented in separate text nodes internally (this is not accessible to us mere mortal webmonkey’s, however. the DOM Inspector shows the entire text as one single textarea – I even tried to work around it by working on counts from the textLength, but it’s a no-go, the problem is intractable on this end). Also, even when it does work, there doesn’t seem to be any way to undo once you’ve done the insert. That’s awfully annoying. The entire selection / input / editing functionality in Mozilla seems to be pretty rickety, especially when compared to how well IE’s text editing. (Should I even mention ContentEditable? Well, at least there’s Xopus for that – no hope for an XBL fix for selections, that’s still broken.)

Umm, hmm, I’m ranting again. Anyway, as the bug is being actively patched, maybe in a few days this will actually work properly. Until then, it still will, but only if there are no hard line breaks:

• Mozilla Text Editor

I made versions for metafilter and blogger as well. Along the way, I found a fix for blogger’s wonky textare display. It renders properly when the following style code is added:

form { height:100%; padding:0; margin:0; }

I submitted that tidbit to Shellen the other night, but haven’t seen the change go up yet.

Ending massive post by clearing out some random links:

• Using the W3C DOM Level 2 Range Object as Implemented by Mozilla – old and posted before, but it’s a good article
• Mozilla Editor – Tony Gorman wrote a proof of concept, primarily to test caret position values.
• Text Input Selection Test
• Another one

I have Drempels (by Ryan Geiss, of well, Geiss fame) running on my desktop at home right now, and I must say it is pretty trippy / relaxing.

Browser Feature Detection – browser sniffing via API name detection. Detection is done by determining if a property/method is undefined or not using the typeof operand. Full details in the source. (Danny Goodman wrote an article about Object Detection a while back)

The Mozilla Accessibility Project has oodles of links to keyboard shortcut goodness, including a neat DHTML Mozilla Keyboard Assignment Map (Gecko only). For general reference, I still mostly use Jesse’s Navigator Keyboard Shortcuts reference. One thing that I noticed is that this old event test page doesn’t seem to trigger properly in OS X. According to the Mozilla Keyboard Planning FAQ and Cross Reference‘s Macintosh Keyboard Differences section, this shouldn’t be a problem, but I’ve given up on figuring out OS X’s keyboard related funkiness.

Yahoo ads set to get busier – I think this sort of says it all:

Yahoo said it will incorporate the technologies of Eyeblaster, EyeWonder, PointRoll and Unicast to boost the interactive advertising packages that it sells to clients. Yahoo said the deal will help it more easily sell catchier advertising campaigns.

The four companies have developed technologies that make it hard to avoid Web advertisements. Eyeblaster produces flash-animated pop-up ads; PointRoll technology expands ad banners when a mouse cursor touches it; EyeWonder lets advertisers stream video commercials onto a Web page; and Unicast creates ads that allow users to navigate within them without leaving a Web site.

Uh yeah, I’d like a second serving of the Eyeblaster please.

Jaguar will have Zeroconf built in. In the grand Apple ‘giving a standard technology another name’ tradition, they are calling it Rendezvous.

How To Write Unmaintainable Code

Stocks’ Slide Is Playing Havoc With Older Americans’ Dreams – while I do feel bad for these people, I have to ask, what is the rationale of putting your entire nest egg in equities after you’ve retired. Sure your broker is going to tell you to buy, that’s what they get paid to do, but stocks are inherently high risk with no guarantee on the principle. I guess a lot of people lost sight of that during the boom times. If I had $2 million, I’d put them in bonds, or better yet in annuities. One of those suckers (guaranteed principle and rate of return) will still average you around 5-7%/yr. Off of $2 million principle, we’re talking about a pretty damn comfortable retirement lifestyle.