A particular project I’m working on requires graying out options in a drop down box. I discovered the disabled attribute, which can be used as follows:


<select name="range">
    <option value="7">last 7</option>
    <option value="30">last 30</option>
    <option value="60" disabled="disabled">last 60</option>
</select>


Normally you can just write ‘disabled’, but to be valid XHTML, you need the disabled=’disabled’ variant. The point is, this works fine and looks great in Firefox. The options are not selectable and are nicely grayed out.

The problem I discovered is that IE doesn’t support this. They apparently never have and, at least from what I saw, don’t even support it in IE7. So tonight I’ll be working up some hacks to get around this. How much time is lost due to having to pander to IE’s deficiencies?