Getting CSS rules to work across all browsers is a continuous fight. Thankfully, there are workarounds and DHTML methods to correct many of these problems, and if those fail, reluctantly there are hacks available. Unfortunately, it seems I’ve run into a difference of opinion between the browsers, most likely as a result of the W3 Consortium failing (yet again) to be explicit with their standards. The problem is the difference between the way Firefox and Opera interpret the “word-spacing” CSS property versus the way Safari and IE interpret the property. More specifically each browser treats the non-breaking space differently. FF/Opera both respect the non-breaking space and Safari/IE both ignore the space. For example, if the text is “first foo bar last”, FF/Opera would like:

first        foo bar       last

whereas in Safari/IE the text would appear like:

first        foo        bar        last

Personally, I agree with the FF/Opera developers and feel that the non-breaking space should be respected since I’m explicitly telling the browser that words to either side of the non-breaking space should be treated as a unit. So now I’m going to have to put each phrase in some sort of HTML block and depend on a combination of padding and margins to accomplish the same effect in order for it to be cross-browser compatible.

As a few users of MyGoogleCal3 have already pointed out, the script no longer works properly. That’s the bad news. The good news is version 4 does work. In fact, with the latest changes Google made to their code, ALL the features that were broken in 3 appear to be working now—Agenda/Week view, the calendar navigation buttons, and IE is fixed. Please download and test out the latest version, and report any bugs in the comments and I’ll try to resolve them as time allows.

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MyGoogleCal2 no longer works 100% in Internet Explorer. A runtime error occurs when navigating month-to-month or when switching to Agenda mode. The workaround is to simply hide the navigation interface. Now, I don’t know if this bug was introduced when Google updated the code last month, or if it’s always been there and I just never noticed. In any case, the runtime error occurs when //"+a.host+"/calendar is replaced by //www.google.com/calendar. Given the poor debugging available in IE, I didn’t get very far with figuring out why IE breaks. I suspect that when IE makes an XmlHttpRequest, it’s double checking that the request URL matches up with the server host, or something to that effect. Since Google obfuscates the Javascript code, it’s just way too hard to try and fix it. Instead, I’ve opted to create a new version of MyGoogleCal that uses the original technique for IE but uses the technique from MyGoogleCal2 for all other browsers.

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The long awaited new version of MyGoogleCal is here. It supports the new AJAX-enabled Javascript method Google switched to last month. As a bonus, the new version has native support for multiple calendars each with their own colors! Other changes to the code include officially switching from fopen to curl to retrieve the data. Furthermore, the code replaces much less HTML since it’s encapsulated in Javascript. Without further ado…

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