Attribute "target" exists, but can not be used for this element.

These days I am all about valid xhtml and was surprised to receive this validation error when using the target attribute on an anchor tag.

Attribute "target" exists, but can not be used for this element.

I found a nice work around that does not involve window.open, using jquery we can hack the attribute on 'after' the dom has loaded.

Now instead of target='_blank' you can just use class='target-blank', if the browser does not support javascript it will not open in a new window but the link will still work - and we have our valid xhtml.

Resources

• cre8asiteforums
• W3C Markup Validation Service
• JQuery

Ajax error handling with ruby on rails and jquery

This sample is just a slight modification of this post 'Handling AJAX errors and displaying friendly error messages to users'. Basically I wanted to maintain the existing rails error handling for non-ajax pages and then have good handling for errors in both development and production mode; i.e. get errors in the browser when in development mode and show a nice message when in production mode.

Modify /app/controllers/application.rb; add the rescue_from macro and the handler_exception method

Then add a global javascript method for presenting the errors; most likely in application.js

Then a sample usage, jquery making an ajax post to a rails controller action

in development mode the error message is returned in an easier to read view in the firebug console and an alert message is presented that has a truncated version of the error

in production mode just a friendly error message.

Resources

• Handling AJAX errors and displaying friendly error messages to users
• Rails source code rescue.rb
• Rails views source on your install lib/action_controller/templates/rescues
• jquery ajax

use jquery to disable a button when clicked

jquery is such a great javascript library, the more I use it the more I like it

NOTE: the above code snippets are untested - cut, pasted and modified from real code that was tested (and worked!)