QUICKTIP: * { border: 1px solid red; }

02/03/2010 04:12 PM by Chris Toohey

It worked fine in Firefox, which is equipped with both Firebug and the Web Developer Toolkit, so no help there. It even worked in Internet Explorer 6, but I couldn't get it to work in IE7! I spent far too long (more time than I'm willing to admit) trying to find out why the actionbar for a rather complicated XHTML Form (complete with content-sensitive hide-whens, JSON-driven UI data pickers, interactive field-level validation, etc.) would become deactivated if I selected one - and specifically one - of the Tabbed Table tabs.

Note: these are home-grown Tabbed Tables, not the IBM Lotus Domino-generated kind...

While I had my suspicions, it wasn't until I deployed a single line of CSS that can be one of the most effective forms of defense when fighting dynamically-generated XHTML, JavaScript, and CSS:

* { border: 1px solid red; }

Adding this to the bottom of my Stylesheet did the trick. Apparently a rogue DIV element was displaying over the actionbar, making it impossible to click.

A quick update to my hide-when logic and I had a fully-functional XHTML Form! ... still had to work with IE7, though.