253062 - abetz-rouse.com.au - Cannot write to the status bar with javascript in links, when DHTML conponents are on the page

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English Other, defect)

Description

[gordon_e_rouse]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4.1) Gecko/20031030
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4.1) Gecko/20031030

If you place the following directive inside a link:
ronMouseOver="window.status='Some Status Text';return true;" normally the line
'Some Status Text' would write to status bar. On simple web pages this always
works. 

I discovered that when DHTML menus are used, the status bar cannot be written to. 
OK I admit that seems far fetched and totally unrelated, but if you make a copy
of the website page with the DHTML components the window.status='XXX' never
work, the moment you comment out the javascript line that writes the hidden
layers, the window.status='XXX' starts working again.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.Load page http://abetz-rouse.com.au/status_test.html
2.Roll over the second link and status bar is blank
3.Load page http://abetz-rouse.com.au/status_test_no_dhtml.html
4.Roll over the second link and the status bar is written to
Actual Results:  
Despite the javascript that should set the status bar to the status bar, the
status bar remained blank. In the second instance only the call to write the
DHTML invisible layers was commented out and the status write worked. 

Expected Results:  
On both pages I would expect that "window.status='Some Text';return true;" to work

Comment 1

[Mats Palmgren (inactive)]

onmouseout="FW_startTimeout();return false"

1. You need to change that to onmouseout="FW_startTimeout();return true"
2. You also need to remove the (last) line status="" in the function writeMenus

Then it works.  I can understand why 1 is needed, but not 2 - is a global
status variable blocking window.status ?

Comment 2

[Christian :Biesinger (don't email me, ping me on IRC)]

(In reply to comment #1)
> Then it works.  I can understand why 1 is needed, but not 2 - is a global
> status variable blocking window.status ?

the global scope in javascript _is_ |window|. so window.foo is equivalent to foo.
and assignment to undeclared variables makes them global.

Comment 3

[Mats Palmgren (inactive)]

OK, so why was it necessary to remove the status="" line then?
The writeMenus function is only called once and I don't see how that line
can affect later assignments to window.status.
Also, if I change it to window.status="" then it also works.

Comment 4

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

"status" is a replaceable variable.  So if you write to a global "status" var,
not window.status, then instead of setting window.status it sets a global status
var (on the window object, since that's the global object), which shadows
window.status thereafter.

That behavior is needed for compat with existing websites.

Comment 5

[Brendan Eich [:brendan]]

So is this WONTFIX, or INVALID, or possibly evangelism?

/be

Comment 6

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

I supposed evangelism. fw_menu.js is available from
<http://www.macromedia.com/support/fireworks/ts/documents/commented_js_file.htm>
and is also available as a later version mm_menu.js which has the same problem. 

Any of you guys have a good contact at MM?

Comment 7

[Mats Palmgren (inactive)]

FWIW, the original code does not have this problem:
http://developer.netscape.com/viewsource/smith_menu/menu.js

Comment 8

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Over to evangelism.

Comment 9

[Mike Taylor [:miketaylr]]

Pages no longer exist.