How can I force WebKit to redraw/repaint to propagate style changes?

Question

I have some trivial JavaScript to effect a style change:

sel = document.getElementById(\'my_id\');
sel.className = sel.className.replace(/item-[1-9]-selected         


        

Answer 1

I cannot believe this is still a problem in 2014. I just had this issue when refreshing a fixed position caption box on the lower-left hand of the page while scrolling, the caption would 'ghost' its way up the screen. After trying everything above without success, I noticed a lot of things were either slow/causing issues due to creating very short DOM relayouts etc causing somewhat unnatural feeling scrolling etc...

I ended up making a fixed position, full-size div with pointer-events: none and applying danorton's answer to that element, which seems to force a redraw on the whole screen without interfering with the DOM.

HTML:

CSS:

div#redraw-fix {
    position: fixed;
    top: 0;
    right: 0;
    bottom: 0;
    left: 0;
    z-index: 25;
    pointer-events: none;
    display: block;
}

JS:

sel = document.getElementById('redraw-fix');
sel.style.display='none';
sel.offsetHeight; // no need to store this anywhere, the reference is enough
sel.style.display='block';