Re: scrollIntoView for XML documents

conor325 wrote:

> for HTML and XHTML (http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml), the function
> scrollIntoView allows you to pick an element in a document and make it
> visible in a browser frame or window. However our texts are XML files,
> specifically XHTML 2 with "section" and "h" and other tags specific to
> that standard. Firefox treats them, as it should, as "plain XML" but it
> doesn't support scrolling to a point for such documents ... or does it?
> Is there a way to dynamically make an arbitrary element in a displayed
> XML document visible?

You could implement that with script if arbritary XML elements had 
offsetLeft/Top/Parent properties but they don't have that with Mozilla.

Opera 8.00 beta seems to expose those properties to XML elements so I 
have a simple test case with Opera 8.00 beta where you can do

     function getPageCoords (element) {
       var coords = null;
       if (typeof element.offsetLeft != 'undefined') {
         coords = { x: 0, y: 0 };
         while (element) {
           coords.x += element.offsetLeft;
           coords.y += element.offsetTop;
           element = element.offsetParent;
         }
       }
       return coords;
     }

     function scrollElementIntoView (element) {
       /* desirable but does not work
       if (typeof element.scrollIntoView != 'undefined') {
         element.scrollIntoView(true);
       }
       */
       var pageCoords = getPageCoords(element);
       if (pageCoords) {
         window.scrollTo(pageCoords.x, pageCoords.y);
       }
     }

The coordinates are not precise it seems as the scroll position seems a 
bit wrong but the properties are there.


-- 

	Martin Honnen
	http://JavaScript.FAQTs.com/