Lightbox Component and IE 6 & 7 Compatibility

[Jonathan Hung]

During some recent testing, we have discovered that the Lightbox component
is not completely functional in Internet Explorer. From a User Experience
perspective the component is buggy in IE, though in certain circumstances it
can work the way we expect,

The following are the issues we've encountered in the past week:

1. DIV focus
Currently in Firefox 2+, when you tab to the Lightbox component the first
thumbnail would become selected to indicate that the user can perform
actions on the thumbnails. However in IE 6 & 7 focusing on that DIV is
inconsistent and therefore causing the resulting arrow and CTRL key actions
to not work.

If you're interested in more detail and how to get the component to work in
IE before we get a fix in place, please let me know. This is a UX problem in
IE and we are currently investigating solutions.

2. JSUnit tests do not run in IE 6 & 7 if Javascript test code is located in
a seperate file.
Currently the Lightbox unit test is separated into two files:
LightboxTests.html and LightboxTests.js. With all the test Javascript code
in the LightboxTests.js file, JSUnit will not execute the tests in Internet
Explorer 6 & 7.

One way to overcome this is to copy the contents of LightboxTests.js into
LightboxTests.html. There may be another solution, but more research is
required. Ideally we would like to have our test Javascripts residing in a
separate file for maintainability and separation of function.

3. JSUnit 2.2a may be incompatible with Dojo
During our testing, we discovered that JSUnit 2.2 Alpha (latest downloadable
release) is not compatible with IE 7. Attempting to run the tests will yield
"dijit is undefined" or "fluid is undefined" errors. JSUnit 2.1 (the last
stable release) appears to work as expected with IE7. A solution would be to
use version JSUnit 2.1 instead of JSUnit 2.2 for our testing.

4. Lightbox component will only work for IE 7 if served from Tomcat
IE 7's security features prevent our component from being loaded directly
from the hard drive. Therefore the component needs to be deployed into
Tomcat and served up. The obvious disadvantage to this is that IE 7 testing
will require users to have Tomcat installed. Luckily if you are testing just
the component, you don't need to have any Sakai running which can speed
things up considerably.


With this in mind, if you are planning on demoing the component, try to use
Firefox 2.0+ if possible. If using IE 6 or 7 is absolutely critical, please
let me know and I'll walk you through the process to get it working.

We are currently doing research and testing various solutions. Getting
Lightbox working in IE is very important (goes without saying) so we hope to
get the most critical issues resolved soon.

Questions? Comments? Need more detail? Let us know!

Take care,

- Jonathan.

-- 
Jonathan Hung / jonathan.hung at utoronto.ca
University of Toronto - ATRC
Tel: (416) 946-8312
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