Sneak preview: I’ve started working on another new PHP-based HTML and AJAX rendering class, called awfRadial. Click the thumbnails for a bigger storyboard image of rendering concepts.

The premise is simple: display between 1 and 48 rendered “objects” in radial form around a central element, each object having user configurable HTML, CSS, and AJAX properties for complete customization. This will be generic so that it can be implemented in many ways; I’ll probably release several additional wrapper classes for some common implementations such as radial context menu, or data drill-through applications.

Having read-up some on other attempts to create browser-happy radial menus, I’m assuming this will be a fairly daunting project, as most people have moved on to Flash or Java applets to make it work. I aim to make the end result as extensible as possible, but I always take the “crawl, walk, run” approach with new projects. So the first version will likely be rendered as a flat HTML table emulating a circular layout. To do this with raw CSS positioning will have to wait for a later release. The cross-browser issues relating to DIV positioning are my pet peeve and I want to at least get proof of concept functional before banging my head against IE6.

Tags: awfRadial, class, CSS, menu, PHP

Comments Off

After Wes Friend’s earlier catch on the ajax errors in IE6, I did some more testing and, wouldn’t you know it, there are more things to be fixed for the errant browser… Currently known problems between awfDialog’s rendered output and IE6:

1. Some of the elements referenced using the SetCSS method don’t appear to get their CSS styles under IE6. Most notable is the Title element. You can still get around at least some of those issues by being more explicit with your title string, meaning you can embed the raw html to fix display properties using the SetTitle() method
2. A larger problem is the clipping region of the BodyPane div. Although everything should scale dynamically based on the width property you set, it seems IE6 is going to ignore this and render roughly the right 30pixels of the BodyPane outside the div, clipping it. And it is ignoring the “overflow” CSS attribute. I’m stumped at how to deal with that, but it is a real issue if you are in Wizard mode, as it ends up hiding the Next button. Anyone know how to trick IE6 regarding div overflow and clipping regions?

Tags: awfDialog, CSS, Internet Explorer

Comments Off