boogdesign posts

I started a new project at work today, adding some ajaxy interactivity to a slightly long in the tooth web application. In a previous iteration I'd plugged prototype.js 1.5.1 into this app, now I wanted snazzy effects and autocomplete fields. Figuring it was a good time to move up to the latest version of scriptaculous, I downloaded the recently released 1.8.0 version (which includes prototype 1.6.0).

I had to do some hacking around in my 'legacy' javascript to get things working in Firefox (that's how long in the tooth this application is), and then I added my Ajax.Autocompleters, got my afterUpdateElement callbacks working and was starting to feel generally quite chuffed with myself at how well it was all going. Then I thought I'd give it a quick check in IE...

In IE7 the up and down arrows didn't scroll up and down the autocomplete list, which made the whole thing kind of useless. A quick check in IE6 confirmed the same issue there, so I immediately resorted to Google. Unfortunately the answer wasn't immediately apparent in the search results and it was only when I started searching the Ruby on Rails Trac directly I finally homed in on the answer. Hoping that I can help future searchers home in on this more quickly, here's the defect: "some keypress events don't work in IE6/7"; and here's the fix.