Dead anchors in Explorer

Freeway
1

I’ve got a long page that has vertical navigation, with links at the top sending visitors down to various sections of the page (incorporating Weaver’s nice Smooth Scrolling to Anchors action). The typical “Back to top” links then take visitors back up to the main links.

The weird thing is that all my links work in Safari, Camino, OmniWeb and Opera for Mac, but on IE for PC the “Back to top” links don’t work. Visitors can jump down the page with the links at the top, but then have to scroll back up manually because the links lower down the page don’t work.

This has me scratching my head, because the links are exacly the same in theory. Does anyone know what might be causing this? Thanks.

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2

On Nov 7, 2007, at 4:02 PM, derekzinger wrote:

I’ve got a long page that has vertical navigation, with links at
the top sending visitors down to various sections of the page
(incorporating Weaver’s nice Smooth Scrolling to Anchors action).
The typical “Back to top” links then take visitors back up to the
main links.

The weird thing is that all my links work in Safari, Camino,
OmniWeb and Opera for Mac, but on IE for PC the “Back to top” links
don’t work. Visitors can jump down the page with the links at the
top, but then have to scroll back up manually because the links
lower down the page don’t work.

This has me scratching my head, because the links are exacly the
same in theory. Does anyone know what might be causing this? Thanks.

This is something that I have wrestled with on my own Smooth Scroll
action. The problem seems to be something to do with dimensions. If
you make a bare-bones HTML page using regular nested DIV
construction, you can make a page as tall as you want and never have
a problem scrolling it. But the moment that you start using absolute
positioning, as Freeway does out of the box, you will have trouble.

Scriptaculous has a mode: absolute configuration setting for its
ScrollTo effect, which is the one I use, but I haven’t figured out
how to detect whether I need to enable it from within an Action.

What you might try is to see if making your page using tables has any
impact at all on the problem. If that fixes it, then that will be an
interesting data point. Go through your layout, select each item on
the page in turn, and un-check the Layer checkbox in the Inspector.
When you have done every last thing, try publishing your page again
and see if the anchors work again.

Otherwise, the only advice I can offer is to take the smooth scroll
action off of the page.

Walter

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3

Thanks, Walter. The page is actually already made up of non-layer tables, one after the other, so it looks like I’ll have to give up the smooth scrolling. Let’s see if that solves the problem.

Cheers

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4

Before you do that, go through all of those tables and delete their
heights. Or set them to Height Can Shrink – don’t know which of
those will work in your case. That might allow you to keep your
beloved smooth scroll.

Walter

On Nov 7, 2007, at 4:36 PM, derekzinger wrote:

Thanks, Walter. The page is actually already made up of non-layer
tables, one after the other, so it looks like I’ll have to give up
the smooth scrolling. Let’s see if that solves the problem.

Cheers

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5

Ack. I tried eliminating the Smooth Scroll action, but the BTT links still don’t work. Grr.

I’ll try your suggestion about heights, Walt. Cheers.

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6

OK, nothing is working here. Removing the Smooth Scrolling action doesn’t solve the problem, and ticking “Height can shrink” for every table collapses them so that they are much shorter than I’d like.

Bloody Internet Explorer…

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7

Couple of thoughts:

Are the ‘back to top’ links actually pointing to a ‘real’ anchor that you have created? Or do they just point to ‘myPage.html#’?

Doesn’t IE have a problem with anchors attached to images (versus those attached to text)?

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8

They point to a white .gif called at the top of the page. The .gif is called “top” and serves as an anchor.

Not sure about th IE bug, as other anchors on the page seem to work – i.e no problem jumping down the page from links at the top. All very weird.

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9

Problem solved. I’m not exactly sure what the deal was, but changing that white .gif at the top of the page to text has passed IE’s bug test (looks like you were right, Weaver). All anchors now work! And I’ve been able to keep the Smooth Scrolling! Pardon me while I eat the proverbial cake…

So, for posterity’s sake, scrolling to inline .gifs in a table worked for me in IE, but to scroll to the top of the page, I needed to attach the anchor to some text (hidden below the header image).

A big thanks to everyone for their input.

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