I have adapted a Jquery plugin to for-fill my needs to send GET requests to servers as a way of "pinging" them.

I've also added some javascript code to add some fancy features like: depending on the changed value in a that the Jquery plugin changes, it changes the Icon accordingly.

To make it all work essentially, I made so that when Ajax gets a "complete" event, it forces a "onChange" event to the span, triggering the javascript validation function to change the status icons.

Here is the code of my slightly modified jQuery Plugin:

/**
 * ping for jQuery
 * 
 * Adapted by Carroarmato0  (to actually work instead of randomly "pinging" nowhere instead of faking
 *
 * @auth Jessica
 * @link http://www.skiyo.cn/demo/jquery.ping/
 *
 */
(function($) {
    $.fn.ping = function(options) {
        var opts = $.extend({}, $.fn.ping.defaults, options);
        return this.each(function() {
            var ping, requestTime, responseTime ;
            var target = $(this);
                        var server = target.html();
                        target.html('<img src="img/loading.gif" alt="loading" />');
            function ping() {
                $.ajax({url: 'http://' + server,
                    type: 'GET',
                    dataType: 'html',
                    timeout: 30000,
                    beforeSend : function() {
                        requestTime = new Date().getTime();
                    },
                    complete : function() {
                        responseTime = new Date().getTime();
                        ping = Math.abs(requestTime - responseTime);

                                                if (ping > 2000) {
                                                    target.text('niet bereikbaar');
                                                } else {
                                                    target.text(ping + opts.unit);
                                                }

                                                target.change();
                    }
                });
            }
            ping();
            opts.interval != 0 && setInterval(ping,opts.interval * 1000);
        });
    };
    $.fn.ping.defaults = {
        interval: 3,
        unit: 'ms'
    };
})(jQuery);

target.change(); is the code that triggers the "onchange" event in the span:

echo "  <td class=\"center\"><span id=\"ping$pingNb\" onChange=\"checkServerIcon(this)\" >" .$server['IP'] . "</span></td>";

In Firefox this works, checkServerIcon(this) gets executed and passes the span object to the function.

function checkServerIcon(object) {
    var delayText = object.innerHTML;
    var delay = delayText.substring(0, delayText.length - 2);

    if ( isInteger(delay) ) {
        object.parentNode.previousSibling.parentNode.getElementsByTagName('img')[0].src = 'img/servers/enable_server.png';

    } else {

        if (delay == "bezig.") {
            object.parentNode.previousSibling.parentNode.getElementsByTagName('img')[0].src = 'img/servers/search_server.png';
        } else {
            object.parentNode.previousSibling.parentNode.getElementsByTagName('img')[0].src = 'img/servers/desable_server.png';
        }
    }

}

My guess would be that there's something different in WebKit browsers in the way object.parentNode.previousSibling.parentNode. .... works...