This is just a quick update for those of you commenting on the blog via Internet Explorer 7. Over time, more and more of you have been emailing me about a JavaScript bug where when a user would click the link to add a comment to a blog post, nothing would happen and IE would tell you there was an "Error on Page," with an essentially random line number that really tells you virtually nothing. For anyone doing JavaScript development on IE, you know how hard debugging is. There was a time where this affected no copy of IE7 in the office, at home, or anywhere else I checked, while we still received reports of it happening to users out in the wild.
In any event, recently (for some inexplicable reason) this bug started happening to some computers in the office, so I was able to start testing and come up with a fix. For those of you interested, newer updated versions of IE7 don't play nicely with certain animations in the script.aculo.us library. Attempts to upgrade our version of script.aculo.us did more harm than good, so the only real solution we have is to slightly limit the user experience for IE7 users.
In English, this means that while on Firefox your comment box will gracefully fade in above the comment thread and be dragable, on IE7 your comment box will just appear at the top of the comments and be stationary. Hopefully IE7 will soon have better support for script.aculo.us animations, or vice versa, but until then we're stuck with a slightly "less cool" commenting system for those of you on IE7.
By: Jeff Pollard
Blog Comments Bug Fixes for IE7 Users
Moz News
The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
I'm just glad I'm able to post and comment again. It seemed like shortly after officially becoming a Premium member, my ability to add comments disappeared. The conspiracy thoughts in my mind were running rampant. ;)
Not to put down the great work on this site but if these scripts don't work in IE7 and don't work in Safari, maybe it's time to custom code something that does. I like Firefox just fine but I'm on Safari most of the time and I bet the site gets a lot of traffic from IE 7 also.
Thanks again for fixing the comments so they work in Safari Matt ;)
Nick - actually, Matt's no longer with us. Jeff & Mel are now the SEOmoz dev team and both worked to fix this issue. :)
It works, it just doesn't use the above and beyond fancy scriptaculous stuff that Matt originally added or comments. That said, next time around we'll probably make the comments a little less "flashy", but still as cool and usable as they are now.
If you need any help debugging Javascript feel free to drop me a line. I've got a fair bit experience
Nice fix. I vacillate between IE and firefox and had been unnable to post comments till I saw this today.
Thanks
I finally got my husband to download Firefox for the first time last night. Actually, I downloaded it for him. I gave him back his computer and he began using it, very quickly realizing that something was different.
"What did you do to it?" he asked. "The pages come up so fast now."
I would like to point out that I was the lucky Mozzer who found she couldn't add comments with IE. Just goes to show how often I use the browser, huh :D
I'm guessing that because Flock is Mozilla-based, there shouldn't be any problems in it?
Also, not that I have been graced by the IT gods with a mac, but I assume Safari is also sympatico with scriptaculous?
Safari borks on our WYSIWYG editor more than scriptaculous, really, but yeah it doesn't play nice with scriptaculous either.
On a (vaguely) related point, any idea why the Firefox spell-checker doesn't seem to work for me in your comments box, but is fine on just about any other site I use?
Most likely because Firefox spell check only works on <textarea> tags, and the WYSIWYG editor uses an Iframe to compose the comments.
right click in the text box and select "spell check this field"
Thanks fella.
IE is such a pain to deal with. For a brower thats been around forever you'd think they would have a better handle on develoipment issues.
I've gotten pretty good at working...around...its CSS issues, but I'm at a loss when it comes to dealing with IE and JavaScript.
I know what you mean Jeff. CSS is easy enough if you stick to standards and then toss in a handful of tweaks for IE using conditional comments. I think I'm done to about a half dozen IE specific lines of css on any site.
JavaScript though...
Hey Flux, have you tried firebug lite?
https://www.getfirebug.com/lite.html
Very useful for debugging in IE and safari. Might I also point you in the direction of Dan Webb's excellent Lowpro library for Unobtrusive Javascript:
https://www.danwebb.net/lowpro/
Yeah, I installed Firebug light on our internal development build and all it did was tell me the same error that IE was telling me. So, pretty useless. But if I run in to a IE JavaScript problem again I'll give it another shot.
That is one of the many subtle ways MS is trying to stear web standards their way.
Out of curiosity, is an off the shelf blog platform used for SEOmoz or is it something custom?
SEOmoz is a completely custom built site, using the Cake PHP framework
Thanks for the info. I dug into the source but did not find any comments on it, and searching through the site reveals nothing. Maybe that fact could be *cough* placed somewhere more visible:)
*cough* At the bottom of every page on SEOmoz it says CakePHP *cough*
haha - ouch, matt, ouch
I am going to blame it on my colorblindness and say it blended into the background!