Code Scavenger’s Chronicles

…was launched yesterday. One of the coolest implementations of canvas around.

It has some interesting stuff in there. For instance :- a global event bus for all events and listeners, a nice little syntax resolver which supports js, html, css currently. Very easy on the eyes, javascript.

They are also going to support VIM syntax per the forums. That’ll be the day!

I’m in.

You won’t know how important this sucker is unless you’ve coded confirmation dialogs in IE7. Yes, those worthless pop-ups which are supposed to help out the clueless.

<husky_mocking_overbearing_voice>
You might want to save you changes before you go to the other link! Are you sure you want to navigate away? Were all those clicks really just fluff not to be recorded for posterity?
</husky_mocking_overbearing_voice>

I was merrily invoking a js function from an anchor which throws up a innocuous confirmation dialog when I realized that clicking Cancel was still posting the page to the href URL!

Here are the relevant bits:-

<a onClick="javascript:return processClick(event);" href="/takemeaway">Click me</a>

function processClick(event) {
    if (unsavedChangesOnPage) {
        return showDialog(event);
    }
}

function showDialog(event) {
    return confirm("Do you really want to lose your changes?");
}

Apparently, with confirmation dialogs sometimes (on some machines; come on I should have a better answer); IE forgets to set the event returnValue to false! Bloody piece of crap!

Anyway, the solution was merely setting event.returnValue explicitly to false if Cancel was clicked.

Here’s the fix:-

function processClick(event) {
    if (unsavedChangesOnPage) {
        var result = showDialog(event);
        if (!result && itsStupidIE()) {
            event.returnValue = false;
        }
        return result;
    }
}

No love lost between me and IE!

Not now; not ever.

Hummm…And I thought I knew property resolution in Javascript.

Read this and decide for yourself.

Everyday is a real humbling experience!