The Button

One thing I noticed very quickly is that every time I Google some GWT issue I get the same 3-4 web sites, GWT official site and 2-3 blogs, that’s it. If you think about it, it’s pretty neat because I already know all of them top to bottom and I can stop wasting time on the net.

My last task was styling a button, I started by doing some reading on the various ways to do styling, pretty quickly I figured it is not going to be as smooth as it is in Flex.

I quickly tried the different methods (2 days and 5 hours) and I focused on the “sliding doors” technique (2 images used on the button and on the “span” object inside the button to achieve a button with image as skin that can expand to the width of its text).

Some copy paste from the only example I could find, a quick build, e voila: I get a button that looks like a picture of Dali. 2-3 more tweaks to the css, few hours to understand I need to remove the “text” from the button and move it to the “span” and it started to look like a button.

I spent the next few hours with the excellent FireBug plugin to get rid of a stubborn pixel glitch, and at last, while I'm exhausted but with a sense of achievement my button was ready.

Hmm, not really, I made the mistake of trying it on other browsers, I now got 2 distorted versions of my infamous button.

Cross browsers, yeah right.