I ran into a ‘bug’ in jQuery that only occurs in IE and under specific circumstances. Actually, it’s not really a bug in jQuery… it’s more a funky “feature” of our beloved* browser: Internet Explorer. (* yeah right, muaha 
)
In jQuery you can easily get the href attribute value off of a link by doing $("mylink").attr("href"); but sometimes in IE this isn’t reliable. For example: normally, if the href value is “#myAnchor”, jQuery will return —surprise, surprise— the string: “#myAnchor”. But in some cases with IE, you’ll get the full URL path of the page you’re currently on, with the anchor string value appended to it (for example: “http://labs.thesedays.com/#myAnchor”).
This bug is specifically annoying when you use the href value in a selector in jQuery. For example, you should never do the following, because it may result in unexpected results when browsing in IE: $("a[href='#myAnchor']").click(...);
Workaround? Instead of using the href attribute, you could use the rel or xref attributes of a link, but these attributes aren’t supposed to be used for this purpose and if you disable javascript, the anchors won’t work anymore.
The jQuery devs should fix this issue ASAP, because I think that issues like these are the main reason why people use javascript libraries like jQuery: they make hacky javascript work!
For me, this proves once again that Internet Explorer totally fails at DOM management.
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We’re here again with a quick post from a busy battlefront. We’ve been hard at work on some pretty awesome projects, a few of which we’ll discuss in more detail once they’re finished, but I wanted to take the time to post about a baffling issue we encountered working with Javascript and the ExternalInterface class in AS3.
For an oncoming Nokia campaign we’ve been working on an interactive website that relies heavily on the communication between Javascript and Flash. It involves two instances of Flash Player to interact with the same bit of Javascript. We had our two swf files report to Javascript using a rudimentary event dispatcher (pretty much just a Javascript function called dispatch, that could take one or more params, one of which was the event type)
Now, the issue we encountered was that, sporadically and presenting without any recognizable pattern, the event passed on from the second of the two Player instances, would fail. We just didn’t receive any notice that anything had happened at all. Even more baffling was that the issue only occurred in Firefox on a Windows PC.
After banging our heads against the walls and endless debugging, we finally discovered that the problem lay in the fact that we were calling the same Javascript method from two separate instances. Once we created a separate function to handle the events for both player instances, the issue resolved itself.
If anyone has any explanation as to why this would happen, we’d love to hear it from you 
To me, it seems that Firefox is more and more becoming an endless cesspool of eternal doom for Flash developers.
