IE8 JavaScript and backgroundImage

On one of my site I use a technique where I search for all elements that have the same title attribute. All the ones found I change the backgroundImage so those elements are highlighted.

Works brilliantly on all browsers (IE6, IE7, Firefox [all versions], Chrome, Safari, Opera and maybe a few others). But on IE8, it simply doesn't work!

Testing has shown that the JavaScript works, except where it changes the backgroundImage. That is where it [IE8] simply ignores the action requested of it.

Of interest, backgroundColor works. Just backgroundImage style property does not work.

I checked all the standards and found only one thing that seems to make a slight difference:

obj.style.backgroundImage = "url('images/myBgImage.gif')";

must become:

obj.style.backgroundImage = "url(images/myBgImage.gif)";

One must drop the single quotes.

At first this looked like we are going someplace. But now some work and others don't. Haven't noticed a pattern yet. So, I need to do some more work to figure out a solution to this very peculiar problem.

It is strange that Microsoft has not found this problem yet. There are a number of Blog entries that I have found when googling the problem. One of them gave me an idea which I shall be trying this weekend.

Workshop for IE8 Compatability

We decided yesterday that we would run a workshop to share the tricks we have learned so far to get IE8 to show the various cases we found solutions and work arounds for.

Still choosing a date. Will keep you posted.

Quick review of Microsoft's new IE8

My first experience with IE was a pain. I was hoping that after the candidate release that MS would have fixed many of it's errors, but, alas, its being released out to the world via the Windows automatic updates as a critical update!

What's the issue?

The looks and the tabs handling etc. would not be something that would worry me. Those things one gets used to. My issue and bug with IE8 is that it renders many (some fairly normal markup) differently to every other browser out there.

As designers and developers, we already have to contend with browser differences. We have IE6 still being used quite widely - I was visiting a prospective client yesterday and they still use IE6.

IE6 being very different from the IE7 which, in turn, is different from Firefox, Chrome, etc.

Now we have another browser which renders certain things completely differently from all the other browsers.

Well, its more work for all of us!

That, wouldn't be so bad, except for this: how does one charge for something like this? Clients expect you to have all your design ducks in a row. Ouch!

Some CSS news

As many of you CSS designers have encountered are the different implementations across the different browsers. Well, this could come to an end. Not soon, unfortunately, but maybe by the end of 2009 we may not have to worry about that any more.

Well, IE 8 is about to be released and that will put it on par with the other recent versions of browsers like Firefox, Safari and Chrome.

Here is a link to an interesting article about CSS and how you can do table layouts without tables and without those fancy DIV tricks you have had to use:

Everything You Know About CSS Is Wrong

Can't wait.