Setting a focus on an input box is a hassle with so many different browsers out there. Each browser has their own unique tag to set the focus. Rather than using the browser-specific tags for the focus, one can utilize Javascript to provide the functionality for multiple browsers.

jQuery is a great alternative to adding the focus since its simply a matter of adding a few lines of code to your page. It will work on multiple browsers, whether it be Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, or Safari.

When coding your pages with Javascript/AJAX/CSS, one thing to look out for is the compatibility with your organization’s remote access device. One of the devices I have to consider is the Cisco WebVPN product. It has compatibility issues with things such as the @charset “UTF-8″; and @import command in CSS files. By default jQuery doesn’t work with WebVPN. In this post, I have a fix for making jQuery work with WebVPN.

The cache in Internet Explorer is not very AJAX friendly for GET/POST commands. You must put in a constantly changing variable in the URL such as date with seconds in Internet Explorer. I noticed this when the refresh of my GET command would only work once in my window.setInterval(.. , .. ) function.  However, in Mozilla and Safari, my function was working perfect.

The solution to this is to append the current date and time into the URL of your GET/POST request. Special thanks to this post.

...

...

I previously tried setting the cache to expire on the PHP header …

Over the weekend, I ran across a dropdown script called jdMenu that runs off the jQuery library. It turned out to work great for me, as long as the level of menus is maxed at 2. I prefer using scripts that use the jQuery library in order to simplify the maintenance of scripts and to speed up development of Ajax scripts.

From my experience, modern dropdown menus should only use <ul><li> hierarchy tags to make it easy to maintain. As long as the coder knows HTML, they should be able to modify the dropdown menu. I’ve used dropdown menu …