Posted on 17/02/2009. By Pete Otaqui.
Browser sniffing is bad, or so the logic goes.
There are occasions though where it makes perfect sense – for example where you are fixing a known bug in a specific version of a browser. A good example is the bug in IE 6 that resets the selected index of a Select tag that has a label and the for attribute. This bug doesn’t affect IE 7 or 8, or any other browser, but does make for a bad user experience if you are doing the right thing and including labels for your select tags.
Microsoft has published some javascript to fix this and I adapted their code to work with with the Prototype Javascript Library .
This fix will look for all select tags on the page (you could adapt it to only look for those with the “for” attribute but I have a sneaking suspicion that if anything that would in fact be a bit slower) and observe the onfocusin and onfocus events as suggested in the knowledge base article.
// Select with 'for' attribute fix for IE
Event.observe(window,'load',function() {
if ( !Prototype.Browser.IE || !(parseInt(navigator.userAgent.substring(navigator.userAgent.indexOf("MSIE")+5))==6) ) return;
$$('select').each(function(eSelect) {
eSelect.observe('focusin',function(e) {
try {
var eSrc = window.event.srcElement;
if ( eSrc ) eSrc.tmpIndex = eSrc.selectedIndex;
} catch(e) {}
});
eSelect.observe('focus',function(e) {
try {
var eSrc = window.event.srcElement;
if ( eSrc ) eSrc.selectedIndex = eSrc.tmpIndex;
} catch(e) {}
})
});
});