displaying elements

[Sam]

I've got a definition list dynamically generated by php of varying lengths. It is the only definition list on the page. What is the best way to hide all of the element's except one? I know that i could use getElementsByTagName, but how would i refrence their styles (assuming they don't have an inline style attribute?) I suppose I could add an inline style attribute, but it seems like there should be another way around this issue.

[David Harrison]

What's wrong with just this:



var donthide=7;

for(var n=0;n<document.getElementsByTagName("dt").length;n++){

if(n!=donthide){
document.getElementsByTagName("dt")[n].style.display="none";
document.getElementsByTagName("dd")[n].style.display="none";
}

}

[Sam]

I thought that .style won't work unless you have a style attribute in your markup?

[David Harrison]

You can set the styles for elements quite easily but you can't retrieve the styles that aren't set inline with the element (at least not that I know of).

[fredmv]

Originally posted by lavalamp
you can't retrieve the styles that aren't set inline with the elementYou can, with a little help from DOM2 CSS. See this thread (http://forums.webdeveloper.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=25930) for more details.

[David Harrison]

Is there some sort of online reference for all of the DOM stuff that's even remotely user friendly. All I can find is just lists of things that when I try and read them I just end up staring into space.

Like the W3C site for instance, it's just very large blocks of text that I have to really concentrate and force myself to try and read.

[fredmv]

The Mozilla Gecko DOM reference (http://www.mozilla.org/docs/dom/domref/) would be a good start.

[David Harrison]

That looks pretty good, I'll check it out in detail at school tomorrow (today).

[Sam]

alright, I've got it up in a script, and it is working onload, but not on the links. The script is here: http://www.samingle.com/album.js
and the page it's on is here:
http://www.samingle.com/showpics2.php?dir=/don/Radiohead_Trip/
I'd imagine it has something to do with the links being dynamically generated via the setupLinks() function (which i chose to put there since the links would just be confusing for those without js)

[David Harrison]

I know that this isn't the DOM way to do things, but remember I haven't gone through that list yet Fred. ;)

Why don't you just document.write the links right into your page? You know how many items you have in your definition list because you can count them as you write them with the server-side coding, then put that number into the JavaScript code.

[Sam]

Got it working now, the problem wasn't with the dynamically generated links, but rather that I didn't have anything I didn't have anything resetting the display back to block. Looks like its up and running now.