I have a question about Javascript widgets. The widget I am working on simply embeds content on a page instead of using iframes. So far it looks good. But there are cases where some users layouts are messing up the widget. For example, the widget might require a width of 300px to appear. But the parent div is set to 250px and hence the right part of the widget is cut off.
I was wondering what sort of precautions should be taken to prevent this? I was talking to the product manager who mentioned he wanted me to check the parent div elements and get the size and then show an alternate message if their size is not accurate. But again, since this is Javascript and the widget is supported in many diff browsers(including IE6), I am wondering how fail-safe this method would be? What if I need to iterate the DOM all the way up before getting a valid size? I am also worried about performance here. This extra checks would slow down the delivery of my widget content to “good users” since I am adding a layer of complexity to all users. I don’t want to penalize good users just because of the few errant ones.
I am not using any sort of JS library here, so any solution should not suggest the use of one. Also, the reason for not using a library was simply not to add extra weight to the page load to deliver a widget. I understand that “jquery” for example is small, but in my case, even 24k compressed seems like an overkill for a widget delivery that contains no core code for the widget.
Has anyone dealt with such issues before? What are your solutions to these?
There are reliable ways of determining the size of an element using JavaScript. You’re quite right that you may need to iterate up the tree in some cases, but the answer you get will ultimately be quite valid.
Although you don’t want to directly include any library code in this project, you may consider looking at how the major libraries implement their “what’s the width of this element” functions to drive your own implementation.