How can I force WebKit to redraw/repaint to propagate style changes?

Question

I have some trivial JavaScript to effect a style change:

sel = document.getElementById('my_id');
sel.className = sel.className.replace(/item-[1-9]-selected/,'item-1-selected');
return false;

This works fine with the latest versions of FF, Opera and IE, but fails on the latest versions of Chrome and Safari.

It affects two descendants, which happen to be siblings. The first sibling updates, but the second doesn’t. A child of the second element also has focus and contains the <a> tag that contains the above code in an onclick attribute.

In the Chrome “Developer Tools” window if I nudge (e.g. uncheck & check) any attribute of any element, the second sibling updates to the correct style.

Is there a workaround to easily and programmatically “nudge” WebKit into doing the right thing?

Answer 1

I found some complicated suggestions and many simple ones that didn’t work, but a comment to one of them by Vasil Dinkov provided a simple solution to force a redraw/repaint that works just fine:

sel.style.display='none';
sel.offsetHeight; // no need to store this anywhere, the reference is enough
sel.style.display='block';

I’ll let someone else comment if it works for styles other than “block”.

Thanks, Vasil!