Okay, here's the problem I mentioned which seems to represent a shortcoming in the DOM model. Surely I'm missing something, right? Surely what I want to do is so common that the DOM designers allowed for it, didn't they?
Here it is: I have built a Save button which starts off in a disabled state, then gets enabled as soon as the user changes anything in the form. As it turns out, there's a problem with using 'onchange' since it is not recognized by the DOM until the changed <input> item loses focus, and the user may desire to press the Save button immediately after making the change, which he cannot do since it will remain disabled until he moves the cursor off the <input> item where he made the change. To solve that problem, I am using 'onkeypress', which lets me enable the Save button right away. That actually doesn't work for a <select>, nor do we want it to, since if the user presses 'N', for example, when the value of the <select> is already 'N', we don't want that to be treated as a change. For that situation, it turns out that 'onchange' is the way to go, since indeed the change in this case is recognized by the DOM right away, without waiting for a change in focus. But now for the problem: onkeypress doesn't work for Backspace, and onchange doesn't either. The DOM evidently does not consider Backspace to be a keypress. It also does not regard Tab as a keypress, which is indeed how we want Tab to behave, since nothing changes when the user merely tabs from one <input> field to another. Sometimes that might be what we want for Backspace, too, I don't know. But note that Backspace is destructive of whatever character is to the left of the cursor when Backspace is pressed, and that's a change. In fact, IN SOME CASES, IT IS THE REMOVAL OF A CHARACTER - AND ONLY THAT - which contsitutes the change the user is making. But this key press will not fire the onkeypress event, so it will not let me enable the Save button when it's the only change which occurs. Ouch! I haven't tried them all, but the set of events available for <input> tags does not look promising. None appears to have a definition which would solve this problem. What to do? Thanks for your advice, Peyton ------------------------------------------------------------- Annual Sponsor FigLeaf Software - http://www.figleaf.com To unsubscribe from this list, manage your profile @ http://www.acfug.org?fa=login.edituserform For more info, see http://www.acfug.org/mailinglists Archive @ http://www.mail-archive.com/discussion%40acfug.org/ List hosted by http://www.fusionlink.com -------------------------------------------------------------
