Problems with expand/collapse

Saturday, October 20, 2007 by Dave Winer.

Last night I changed the way Scripting News is rendered in HTML, and while it works in Firefox on the Mac (the browser that I use) it is broken in a bunch of others. This afternoon I'm going to try to get it working everywhere. 

The advice from readers, some of it quite confusing, starts here. 

I've got MSIE 6 running in Parallels, so as I go I'm testing there and in Firefox/Mac. 

Here are the changes I'm making, in order... 

1. Apparently the <a name="xxx"> element is causing a problem, the purpose of it is to enable permalinks to work within the archive pages, Colin suggests making this the name of the <div>, so that's what I did. (This got today's elements expanding and collapsing in IE, but not older days. Very weird.) 

2. In the stylesheet, added width:400px; to both .show and .hide and padding-left:15px; to .show. (That successfully widened the body of each post in MSIE.) 

3. I eliminated the table I was using to indent the body text. (Now the older days expand and collapse. Hurrah!) 

4. Added another 5 pixels of padding for a little bit more indenting.  

5. At this point it appears to work in both MSIE 6 and Firefox/Mac. I will now download Opera and try it there. (Downloaded and installed, but I can't get it to display any web pages including scripting.com. Very very strange. If you have Opera installed, could you try clicking on the pluses and minuses on scripting.com and let me know if it works. Apparently it does.) 

6. Removed some old CSS and Javascript includes from the head section. 

7. Added "min-width:400px;" to the .hide style, per Colin's advice.