So, we do a lot of web programming, and a client recently asked for a modal popup to choose something from. I've done it in the past with using multiple windows and some goofy javascript , and this time decided to forget that crap and finally sit down and get into CSS. The result was an absolutely positioned div tag covering the rest of the page, and for all intents and purposes was a popup. From the user's perspective, popped up nicely. So I had all the niceties of my webcontrols to handle talking between the "popup" and my form, and didn't have to muck about with javascript setting hidden fields in a parent window or other such oddness, and best of all, since it was all server side, I didn't have to deal with javascript implementation differences between browsers.
So, I finish it in decent time, it looks damn good in
a browser that works, and right before I publish it, the thought occurs to me to check it in IE and make sure it looks OK. Now, I'm used to things looking a little worse in IE, since it doesn't handle CSS as well, but when I loaded it up I had a bit of a shock. It worked perfectly, except for the dropdown boxes. My popup popped up, covered up all the form elements, except for the goddamned dropdowns. So I screw with Z indices and other CSS properties I know only vaguely for an hour or so before giving up and waiting to ask Jason the next day. I did do some Googling, and that didn't come up with much helpful.
So the next day arrives, and we determine that its a bug in IE. It draws dropdowns on top of everything else
no matter what. Jason found some articles on the web confirming this, so I start on the ridiculous solution of using javascript to change the CSS on the dropdowns to make them invisible. So that wasn't so bad, but it looks really strange when the popup pops up and all the other normally visible dropdowns disappear for no discernible reason. Since I don't like to startle users, I changed my javascript function to only hide the first
n dropdowns, then went through each page where it was used to figure out how many dropdowns should be turned off, then hard-coded those in there.
In short, thanks Internet Explorer, if it wasn't for you I wouldn't have had to put in that extra 1.5 hours of work, and had the task done when I said it would be done!