Day: <span>January 29, 2003</span>

Thanks to "Jorge" for the answer to my question earlier. I’ve got this implemented here, and wouldn’t you know it — it works!

The trick is to detect whether the browser is MSIE on Windows, and if so then to add a snippet of JavaScript to the page that scrolls to the end of the list:

function window.onload () {document.all["status"].scrollIntoView();}

Of course I also had to remove the #status anchor from the URL, but that wass trivial with the way I had the page coded. Thanks.

Now for a little code clean-up, some docs and a beta release…

I’m working on a new backup/restore feature for Radio UserLand, and have hit a bit of a snag.

The backup/restore operation is initiated by submitting a form in the browser. Since a full backup takes a little time to complete, the page that loads in response to the form submission displays a list describing its progress.

I’ve got an <a name=”status”> tag at the end of the list, and I’m using a meta-refresh tag to reload the status page every 15 seconds to the #status anchor, so that the user will always see the most recent item in the list, which is at the bottom of the page.

So here’s the problem:

The page refreshes just fine using just about any browser I can get my hands on, using MacOS, but Internet Explorer 6 on Windows will only reload the page once with the #status anchor at the end of the URL.

If I remove #status from the end of the URL, then IE will happily reload the page every 15 seconds, but won’t scroll to the bottom to show the user what’s going on.

Apparently this is a bug in IE 6 for Windows, since that’s the only place where I see this behavior. Do any of you IE for Windows gurus out there know a workaround for this bug?