Seeing as though I'm in developer heaven I thought I'd treat myself and use an IE-only DHTML Behaviour for the first time.

I know, I know. I'm a hypocrite. It was only last week that I commented that using JavaScript during a page's onload event to change its DOM was a hack. For some reason I don't mind Behaviors though. Maybe it's because all the code is stuck in a file you never need to see and they're implemented by way of CSS. Makes it feel less like a hack to me.

The Behaviour I used creates striped tables with a rowover hover effect. It's quite nice actually.

Imagine you want a View to be striped. You can do this now with Domino 6, but not when you want to use your own HTML for the view. It's also a bit plain. What if you want a nice hover-over effect too. You know what I'm going to say don't you - it's best to do it yourself.

Plugging a Behavior in to your site is really easy. Once you've uploaded the file (more on that later and tomorrow) you simply add some CSS, like so:

.rowover{
 behavior: url(rowover_js.htc);
 ro--hover-background : #ddd;
 ro--hover-color : #666;
 ro--selected-background : #999;
 ro--selected-color : white;
 ro--shade-background : #f1f1f1;
 ro--light-background : transparent;
}

Note: The weird-looking CSS properties are used to over-ride the default colours in the .htc file.

Then you add a table (in my case with a HTML View stuck inside it) that starts like this:

<table class="rowover" striped="true">

You can get the tables looking really cool. But that's the easy bit. The tricky bit is getting the .htc files recognised by IE. I'll talk about this tomorrow as it's a lesson worth knowing in its own right.

And before any of you say it, I know using IE-only techniques isn't cool. But, I'm allowing myself to do it just this once. Deep down we all know it's much nicer designing just for IE...