Back in January of 2005, Dean Edwards had finally found a work around solution to the Internet Exploder 6 “flicker†problem, wherein hovering over a background element like those used in the “sliding doors†technique; also used for the mgwebservices.ca web site resulting in a very annoying image flicker. His solution was to force an expires_module if using an Apache web server, not a very elegant or transportable answer.
So I’ve got my re-work of the web site mostly working, and thought about checking around for the best way to pre-load some images on pages other than the page a person is on, when I ran across Harvey’s post that lead to Dan’s page with a more browser centric solution using javascript.
Of course that also means you could just add it to your style sheet as well, but that makes for an invalid css. Using the javascript method keeps the web document itself valid with one extra cache-able snippet downloaded and using the Conditional Comments for < IE6 only too, sweet:
try { document.execCommand(‘BackgroundImageCache’, false,true); }
catch(e) {}
Finally a fix to another annoyance for the Mosaic/Spyglass browser engine that should have been dumped a long time ago, seems this BackgroundImageCache fix has been available since November 2005 although the problem has been mentioned on css lists and articles way back to 2002. The support for the fix has been available with dhtml going all the way back to IE version 4 and the execCommand method which is about 1996 or so – hey, it’s less than ten years.