In the last few months I’ve implemented a couple of components that needed to popup “on top of” what was already displayed. The only real gotcha seems to be with how IE deals with (or doesn’t deal with) the mix of absolute positioning, z-index, and how elements are nested.

The trick is basically that IE doesn’t like your hidden widget (which would be ‘position: absolute’) to be nested inside the element with ‘position: relative’… it’s not a huge fan of them being direct neighbors either. What I’ve found to do the trick is adding a seemingly unnecessary span into the mix. By following this pattern:

.
<div style="position: relative; z-index: 1">Some stuff</div>

<span>

<div id="other_guy" style="background-color: red; position: absolute; z-index: 2; display: none;">I'm on top</div>

</span>

<div>Passersby where amazed by the amount of blood.</div>
Of course, all of this (maybe) goes out the window when you’re not trying to hide the absolutely positioned div in the first place. There, I’ve actually had success with the nesting, but who really needs something that looks like that?

It’s simple compared to some other solutions that I’ve seen and (at least in my cases) has done the job for Firefox and the last couple of IE versions.

I was quite interested on firing it up this week to see some new looks and organization coming at me. After going through the process of sending out my weekly evite I get the distinct feeling that the goal was “take what we have and add ajax”. I’m not completely against this by any means – single components may often be singled out as great candidates for ajaxification. But when adding ajax (or any navigation changes) the goal should really be to _improve_ your sites flow – and I feel like that mark was missed.

Many things were added that seem like good ideas but just kind of don’t quite go all the way… breadcrumbing is good – but keeping an additional button that says “cancel” which means “step backwards in breadcrumbing” is necessary

Every week I use “Let guests specify date” – a process that allows all the members of my group to vote on what night of the week is best for the majority. Today, the “choose your dates” component popped up with js instead of being on it’s own re-rendered page. They did add the capability to say “next Tuesday” instead of finding the date which I really appreciate. but the calendar didn’t popup (and I don’t get an error). and my absolute favorite evite bug is still present: the days are not listed chronologically on the evite – this is just plain comical. I type in “next Monday” “next Tuesday” “next Wednesday” – and they show up for my guests in the order “next Tuesday” “next Monday” “next Wednesday”. At least now they’re in english which is easier than numeric dates that are mis-ordered.

The address book pops up in js/ajax – but it’s exactly the same as the old one.

I think I can pretty much sum up how I felt about using Evite last week – and how I still feel after the recent changes by just saying:  It’s a system that gets the job done – it’s really not bad. It just could be much better.

The talk began with the “Where are we headed?” question. Users are expecting a much more interactive, responsive, and good looking interface than they were even just a few years ago. Flash (and now alternatively DHTML) based Laszlo provides all the graphics support – prototype based tools, in a constraint based – inheritance enabled API, that you need to create your site.

Mike answered the anti-Flash portion of the audience with “Don’t hate the player, hate the game”. Loosely translated: Don’t hate Flash because some people abuse it. It can be a powerful tool and is widely distributed/available throughout the browser-user community. As I had quickly mentioned earlier, a DHTML engine has recently become available for Laszlo as well. The demo Mike gave (LZ Pics) illustrated a responsive Laszlo app leveraging the DHTML backend.

Much of the talk centered around demos available at openlaszlo.com. Check out that site for plenty of cool demos and illustrations (especially Laszlo in 10 Minutes, if you’re new).

The actual intersection of Laszlo/Rails was not covered in a whole lot of depth, but more info can be found here and here.

And more on the thought that went into developing this specific talk here.

Justin spent the majority of the presentation showing uncluttered examples of various Rails/Ajax/Prototype capabilities. Auto-complete search, drag-drop, and the like. These were delivered in a "if you haven't played with this yet" sort of way but he also managed to keep it quick enough – and drop in enough 'even if you've done this before you may not know about this' tidbits to keep the more experienced portion of the audience interested.

There was some talk on RJS and he spent some time on the always requested ajax topics… How do you deal with JavaScript disabled? What if a user has an old browser? How do you handle the introduction of new idioms?

The presentation ended with a bang as he demo'd creating an application with the soon to be released Streamlined. Streamlined is an open source framework, developed by Relevance LLC, to bring the simplicity of ActiveRecord to the view layer (coincidentally, this is #2 of the "3 Unsolved Problems" posed in Dave Thomas keynote yesterday). This is really slick – a lot of functionality – good looking (although they are looking for a designer to contribute some improvements) – and best of all: _very_ quick and powerful. I'm definitely looking forward to this being released at OSCON.