Thanks so much for your comment. I appreciate your measured thoughts and I agree with much of what you have said.

I should clarify that despite my complaints, I do believe that Microsoft, despite the antipathy regularly directed toward it, including from me at times, has done an immense amount of good for technology and for the world and has often been unjustly demonized.

For balance you should check out my post on the bug I discovered PHP 5.2.5. It did get fixed eventually.

Programmers just like to complain.

Nice to meet you nicowens.

I’m certainly no MS-zealot, but when I hear someone of your intellect and dedication do so much MS-bashing I feel the need to respond … plus I’m waiting for a DNS propogation

Forget the bugs and behavior issues of some of the latest versions of IE for a moment and be open-minded. MS doesn’t intentioanlly go behind the back of the W3C, at least not since the late 90s. I was a member of the W3C standrads body in the late 90s and understand well the shortcomings of that arrangement. It has more to do w/ capitalism and bureaucracy.

Imagine you’re a for-profit entity (don’t read evil) in the middle of a heated browser war. Your developers have great idea and have been given the go-ahead to produce whatever they want in their browser product in order to take out the dread NS. Again, don’t interpret as evil. Those developers like everyone else loved their product and were just trying to keep their jobs and maybe get a raise. Along ambles this slow standards-minded group that is trying desparately to inject a set of rules for all browsers to adopt. There are two main problems w/ a standards-body like this, which is not government-regulated, in an industry that is functioning much like the Wild West at the time. First, if MS has a great idea for their browser (read hover attribute) and the standrds-body refuses to accept it into the regulations, are you going to build it as a competitive advantage or are you going to agree and dump the idea? Secondly, the standrds group at the time was notorioiusly slow at adopting changes or even agreeing to have the conversation in a speedy manner.

So, MS did what every other like-minded for-profit corporation would’ve done w/ the right resources and ideas. They ran w/ their ideas and left the standrads-body in the dust. This further infuriated those members of the W3C who had self-appointed themselves the ambassadors of everything HTML/CSS at the time and it only served to further exacerbate and already defunct relationship.

The W3C reflected at the time the attitudes of its members, which were open-source people at heart and just not willing to let a giant like MS control the browser market. it was an unwritten war that continues to this day, mostly perpetuated by people who weren’t around and don’t understand that MS revolutionized technologies like the WWW, CSS, XML. We all owe a HUGE debt of gratitude to TBL for his tireless dedication to bringing this world into a new millenium. He should be Time’s Man of the Year every year for what he put together. I don’t mean to offend him or the early starters of the www since I stand so high only b/c their shoulders are so tall, broad, and strong.

Delete/disapprove if you prefer; I would understand your decision.

I think that the problem you are having results from the fact that my script replaces the built in document.getElementById function.

Your script appears check to see if document.getElementById exists. If it does then it uses it and if it doesn’t it uses the document.all array.

Try replacing

theobj = (document.getElementById)?document.getElementById(ele):document.all[ele];

with:

theobj = (document.nativeGetElementById)?document.getElementById(ele):document.all[ele];

and see if that works.

(The clock uses a function I wrote that works in IE and in FIREFOX…..at least it did before the above code was added to another part of the program)

function getElement(ele)

{

var theobj = false;

if(typeof ele == ‘string’)

theobj = (document.getElementById)?document.getElementById(ele):document.all[ele];

else

theobj = ele;

return theobj;

}

I’ve tested the script on IE7, Fx2 and Op9.

document.nativeGetElementById = document.getElementById;

document.getElementById = function( id ) {

if ( document.all ) {// only override when document.all is supported (IE + Opera)

document.getElementById = function( id ) {

var elem = document.nativeGetElementById( id );

if ( !elem ) return null;

// make sure that it is a valid match on id

if ( elem.attributes[‘id’] && elem.attributes[‘id’].value id ) return elem;

// otherwise find the correct element

for ( var i = 1; i < document.all[ id ].length; i++ ) {

if ( document.all[ id ][ i ].attributes[ 'id' ].value id ) return document.all[ id ][ i ];

}

};

} else {// otherwise change back to original

document.getElementById = document.nativeGetElementById;

document.nativeGetElementById = null;// we don’t need it anymore

}

};

document.getElementById();// run document.getElementById() once to let it rewrite itself

Hope you like it.