Prototype.js on IE smashed by id="tblStudents"

Ok, so here is the weirdest IE bug I've ever seen.... the weirdest by far. I was trying to get some sortable table code up and running and after I got it going in FireFox, IE 7 was throwing fits. I narrowed it down to a specific instantiation of the table that I had on my page, and then started hacking things out. I pulled out all my custom DisplayTable code. I remove all of my custom code completely. I removed Scriptaculous.

Turns out IE has a weird behavior where it adds a global scope variable with the same name as any id, so that you can just say tblStudents.innerHTML = 'whatever' without needing to fetch the element. My lack of a var keyword before my variable ment it was trying to reference that variable and causing a conflict.


Prototype Based State Manager

I've known that you could use anchor tags as a way to manage the state of a Javascript application for a while now, but I've never really messed with how that is actually setup. I got bored on Friday, and this is what I came up with.