Monday 7 January 2013

Road search fixed

A friend from my school days pointed out that my previous post about finding a road had a browser problem. The drop-down list of road names get hidden by the map. All things MS and Internet Explorer especially are irritating to me. Quite how a company can grow to be so huge based on such poor quality products still confounds me, but still. The problem is that most people by far who use a computer use an MS operating system on it and a large number of them still use a version of Internet Explorer. If I want wide range of people to be able to use a web page it has to work on IE 7+, there is no option.

It seems that amongst the plethora of inconsistencies that IE demonstrates, there is a horrible process of not supporting the z-index style. z-index should determine which item on a web page should appear above another, with the highest z-index being on top and visible. In IE, anything that uses relative or absolute positioning can cause a separate z-index set to be created, starting at zero which causes the z-index of other objects to be seemingly disregarded. The map tiles use absolute positioning so the drop-down can have a huge z-index and yet it is hidden behind the map. There seems to be various ways to overcome this, but forcing the z-index of the map div to -1 seems to be the simplest solution. Hopefully now anyone trying this simple page will see the list of suggested names above the map.

Some good has come from this. Apart for becoming aware of this problem and trying out the various solutions, I have set up a much better test environment for Windows and IE. A Twitter exchange with Iván Sánchez Ortega also turned up with the concept that Win8 should really be renamed to Fail8 which made me chuckle.

2 comments:

Chris said...

Looks OK with IE 8. :-)

Chris said...

Also IE 9. :-)