Dumb IE6 resize behaviour - hope it rings some bells with someone

Question

Hi,

I'm having no end of fun (sic) with jQuery.tabs. The widget is quite crafty in that it turns basic HTML like so

<div>
    <ul>
        <li>Tab #1</li>
        ...
    </ul>
    <div for panel #1>
    </div>
    <div for panel #2>
    </div>
    ...
</div>

into a cute tabbed dialogue. (It does so by restyling the UL and then toggling the "display" attribute for the panel DIVs to show/not show whatever panel is selected.) Now I found that I can spare myself a lot of trouble in my JS project if I insert a scrollable IFRAME into each panel.

One usability problem I'm trying to ameliorate is that when the tabbed panel becomes larger than the browser's window, then the user ends up with too many scrollbars. I am trying to avoid this situation by linking the size of the tabbed panel to that of $(window). That is, I trap and process the resize event on $(window).

To make my life bearable, all components are relatively sized. This is also true, in particular, of the IFRAMEs (100% width, 100% height). The only exception are the panel DIVs, which are of fixed height (in px). And this is the only dimension css attribute that I manipulate during my resize action.

All of this works a treat in FF and Chrome, but IE6 is doing something rather cute: So long as I do not affect the width of the browser window (but only change its height), only the panel DIV changes in height; the IFRAME contained will not change. As a result of this behaviour, it is not possible to shorten the tabbed panel below the height of the IFRAME. I can lengthen the DIV, yes. But the IFRAME will not fill the panel in that case.

All becomes good the moment I make the slightest change to the width of the browser window. In that moment, the IFRAME expands to catch up with the extended DIV or DIV and IFRAME contract in tandem.

Bizarre. I inserted useless CSS instructions like "position: relative" and "zoom: 1". Also nudged the display with "display: block". No joy so far.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Never mind. Just had an inspiration: jQuery.tabs doesn't mind if I make the panels outright IFRAMEs. That is, I can do away with the wrapping DIV and thus need not rely on IE6 to honour the automatic relative dimensioning (height=100%, width=100%) of the wrapped IFRAME. The IFRAME is now fixed px in height and is directly resized by my resizeHandler. Life is now good across 4 browsers. Yipee!