Changing Style Attribute Values
The lack of automatic content reflow
in Navigator 4 prevents it from displaying most changes to style
sheet attribute values after the document has loaded, even if the
values are exposed to scripting. By contrast, the list of read-write
properties associated with IE 4’s style
object (see Chapter 9) is impressive, to say the
least. If the conditions of your design are just right, however, you
might be able to get away with a cross-platform workaround for the
desired style changes. The tactic is to consider the Navigator 4
methodologies as the lowest common denominator: if the trick can be
done in Navigator 4, it can be done cross-platform, even if not in
the most elegant or efficient way for IE 4.
We’ll examine both an IE 4-specific and a cross-platform way of
cycling a chunk of text through a sequence of colors. For IE 4, the
job is as simple as changing the color attribute of a
SPAN element’s style. For Navigator 4
compatibility, however, each color version of the text must be
created as a separate positioned element that is shown and hidden in
the appropriate order.
Example 5.9 shows the Internet Explorer 4 version. A
single SPAN element in the body has the
color property of its style changed in a
for loop. For programming convenience, the color
names are stored in a global variable array, with another global
variable maintaining a record of the color currently showing. No
positioning or other tactics are required.
Example 5-9. Internet Explorer ...
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