151556 - mkssoftware.com - Dynamic submenus appearing in wrong place

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English US, defect)

Description

[Gert-Jan Vons]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.0.0) Gecko/20020530
BuildID:    2002053012

The submenus are not displayed at the right of the 1st level menu but elsewhere
on the web page. This means I can't select entries in the sub menu.


Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. just go to www.mkssoftware.com
2. popup a menu
3. try to open a sub-menu

Actual Results:  the sub menu is not placed next to the main menu but elsewhere
on the screen. I cannot select entries in the sub menu since it disappears as
soon as I move the mouse out of the 1st level menu.

Expected Results:  The submenu should have been displayed to the right of the
1st level menu

It is as if the sub menu is not positioned relative to the origin of the 1st
level menu, but relative to the origin of the web page?

These menus work fine with IE and NS4 (don't have NS6)

It seems to be the same problem as reported in bug 138738 and 126200, and maybe
others.

Those bugs are listed as "tech evangelism" however, which I interpret as
"Mozilla is right and the web sites are wrong".

Even if that is technically correct, shouldn't mozilla be (bug-) compatible with
IE and NS?  I really doubt that all the broken web sites will fix this, just to
make their site work with Mozilla. They test IE and maybe NS and that's it.

So (bug-)compatibility with IE and NS is probably better than waiting for all
those sites to be fixed (which is unlikely to happen).

Comment 1

[Phil Schwartau]

[e-mail]: your suspicions are correct. Like the other
bugs you mention, this site uses an out-of-date version of the HierMenus
template. To be specific, http://www.mkssoftware.com/js/HM_Loader.js
loads this file: http://www.mkssoftware.com/js/HM_ScriptDOM.js

/*HM_ScriptDOM.js
* by Peter Belesis. v4.0.4 010206
* Copyright (c) 2001 Peter Belesis. All Rights Reserved.
* Originally published and documented at http://www.dhtmlab.com/
* You may use this code on a public Web site only if this entire
* copyright notice appears unchanged and you publicly display
* a link to http://www.dhtmlab.com/.
*/


This version is too low, and should be replaced with the latest version
from http://www.dhtmlab.com/

The problem lies in the function HM_f_ItemOver(), when the 
.offsetLeft property of the parent menu is calculated:


               this.oL += this.offsetLeft;


The .offsetLeft property evaluates to 0 in Mozilla, whereas the
authors expect it to be non-zero. As a result, the child menu is
not offset far enough from the left side of the browser window.

Although you raise an interesting question regarding Evangelism
bugs in general, I have to reassign this to the Evangelism component.
On some points, browsers behave differently from each other,
and Web authors need to know the differences. This has been 
debated over and over, and remains a deep issue -

Comment 2

[Doug Brahm]

Macintosh OSX (10.2.3) Chimera 0.6 Build ID: 2002123104
Check submenus in "http://www.macmall.com/"
source reads: "href="/macmall/shop/cat/Networking/category.asp"" and mouse
over "Networking". Submenu shows on other side of page, making it impossible 
to select item on menu.

Comment 3

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

tech evang june 2003 reorg

Comment 4

[Marek Stępień [:marcoos, inactive]]

They've changed HierMenus to "Jim's DHTML Menu v5.7", and it looks ok now
(checked with Firefox 1.0 and NN7.2).

Resolved fixed.