jQuery fadeIn/fadeOut IE cleartype glitch
While using the jQuery javascript library today at work, I noticed a glitch under IE7. When fading a html node with the .fadeIn() and .fadeOut() functions in jQuery, IE drops the windows Cleartype rendering; which results in very ugly text. This problem appears to be very common, but no one has a nice solution for the problem.
The most common way to solve this problem is by removing the filter CSS attribute. In normal javascript, it would look like this:
document.getElementById('node').style.removeAttribute('filter');
and in jQuery, it would look like this:
$('#node').fadeOut('slow', function() {
this.style.removeAttribute('filter');
});
This means that every single time we want to fade an element, we need to remove the filter attribute, which makes our code look messy.
A simple, more elegant solution would be to wrap the .fadeIn() and .fadeOut() functions with a custom function via the plugin interface of jQuery. The code would be exactly the same, but instead of directly calling the fade functions, we call the wrapper. Like so:
$('#node').customFadeOut('slow', function() {
//no more fiddling with attributes here
});
So, how do you get this working? Just include the following code after you include the jQuery library for the added functionality.
(function($) {
$.fn.customFadeIn = function(speed, callback) {
$(this).fadeIn(speed, function() {
if(jQuery.browser.msie)
$(this).get(0).style.removeAttribute('filter');
if(callback != undefined)
callback();
});
};
$.fn.customFadeOut = function(speed, callback) {
$(this).fadeOut(speed, function() {
if(jQuery.browser.msie)
$(this).get(0).style.removeAttribute('filter');
if(callback != undefined)
callback();
});
};
})(jQuery);
I have been informed by Steve Reynolds that the US Whitehouse Website is using some of the JS documented on this blog post. I would just like to say thanks to everyone who contributed in the comments. :)
