Probably the easiest way to work it out is to get regex-coach, paste your rules (they will need to be modified slightly from the exported text file [remove the trailing '/', replacing the leading '/' with a '|' (regex 'or' operator), pulling the '[Adblock]‘ line, and not putting a ‘|’ on the first line]) and the URL, and see what matches.. and try to fix the rule to allow your content while still blocking the nastiness it was designed to protect against..

Best of luck..

(Cross-posted to the AdBlock forum)

anaadhi: That’s the first I’ve ever seen that script, so there are no current plans to add drawing capabilities to S5. That isn’t the final word; I’d have to play around with the drawing program to see how it works, and big its scripts are. In all that, I’d have to decide whether or not I think such a thing would really be useful. My initial reaction is to doubt that it would be, but I’m willing to let it stew for a few days and see how I feel then.

http://www.walterzorn.com/jsgraphics/jsgraphics_e.htm

For an example of an animation plugin framework (if you’ll forgive me pimping my wares again) see the FreeStyle Menu script I wrote. You might find the script intriguing and/or useful… it was inspired in part by your demo of a CSS :hover menu and uses a CSS layout with a JavaScript behaviour/effects layer on top. If you want to use it on your site feel free!

Anyway, the plugin framework is used with the nested list menu in the main HTML page. I have bundled two animation functions (clipping and alpha fade) with the demo script. They’re called from the FSMenuNode.prototype.setVis() function in the core script. I’m basically using an array of references to functions; the script loops through it, calling each function with a reference to the element being animated and the percentage progress of the animation. Each function therefore does its stuff at each step of the animation and users can add or remove effects as they want.

For S5 you’d either have to have a JS array in the script file, or perhaps ship a few demo animation functions and allow configuration via a META tag, something like:

<meta name=”animation” content=”clipLeftwards” />

S5 would pick it up and use eval() to retrieve a reference to the function. It could then call that reference during transitions at each animation step.

Hope some of this rambling turns out useful!

As for your other question, I’m interested in animation effects for a future version. I did some tests in that direction myself, and found that wipes were quite possible, but full-slide fades were very slow. This may be an effect of my coding style, but it’s something I put off worrying about until later. You can take a look at my tests if you’re interested. There are things that would have to be fixed, like flickers and such.

A “pluggable animation framework” would be nifty, only I haven’t the slightest idea how to go about creating one. Others have proposed plugin architectures, and that sounds very cool, but without an example I’d have no clue how to even begin laying the groundwork for one, let alone create it.

Tyler: I don’t see lines when I resize, probably because the images don’t resize when the window size changes (that’s something I haven’t built in yet). I’m not sure what might be causing what you see.

Tyler and Julien: are you running AdBlock? If so, please disable it and test the slide show again. In the past, the kinds of behavior you both have reported have generally been linked to AdBlock, which I don’t run. I don’t have any of the problems you describe in Firefox 1.0/OS X [specifically Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0]. The navigation buttons all work fine for me, and I can enter a URL into the address bar and get there by hitting return. What actually happens in the latter case is that the slide show advances and then the requested URL loads, which is a little weird but tolerable. I can also use bookmarks without incident.

If you aren’t running AdBlock, then knowing which extensions you are running would be very helpful.

I don’t know if this behaviour is done on purpose, but it’s confusing…

I found that removing the last argument to AlphaImageLoader makes the background image not stretch any more :)

I’ve run into a couple of problems that I can’t seem to figure out. The first is some lines across the images (specifically the XFN pics in the testbed) when the window size is reduced in Firefox 1.0. I assume it’s a rendering thing, but just thought I’d throw it out there.

The second is a problem with my the buttons in Firefox 1.0 when the slideshow is running. For some reason, none of the buttons like Back, Reload, Home or favorite buttons do anything. I don’t know if this is some sort of odd interaction between Firefox and JavaScript, but it’s a little disconcerting. Also, when I try to enter a new URL and press enter, it just advances the slideshow instead of taking me to the page I want. Granted, there are easy workarounds for both of these, but I think it’s a problem that the slideshow is interferring with my normal browser functionality.

As for backgrounds: One more thing I forgot to mention. The DXImageTransform filters only apply to elements that have a specific dimension set. So put something like this in your slideshow:

<div style=”background: url(foo/bar.png); width: 90%”>

It’s a stupid limitation of the IE rendering engine; you can supply a width of anything other than ‘auto’ and it’ll work. Of course your addRule must be ‘*’ not ‘img’ so the behaviour applies to all elements, too (that might have been part of the problem?).

Hope this helps! By the way, what’s your opinion on the animation proposal?

On the other hand, the addRule call you described was exactly the cure for having to embed the behavior call into the document. Thanks! At the moment, my local copy is using it to call pngbehavior.htc, since it works on foregrounds and I understand it better. If I see an example where an HTC works on both foregrounds and backgrounds in S5, then I’ll switch to that.

I’ll look at fixing up my global-variable definitions. Thanks for the explanation.

Update on Home/End: my local copy of S5 now has Home and End jumping to the beginning or end of the slide show. In the process, I discovered that neither key was being used for movement in the slide show, even though I was sure they were. So this turned out to be not a change in behavior, but a case of adding new behavior.