Blog

It’s deja-vu all over again

The browser wars of yore, back when Internet Time set the pace, was an innocent era, pre-spam, pre-Sasser, before grandmothers were sued by record labels. Ahh yes, the good old times, when you coded for the only browser that mattered, and what joy when they introduced the concept of layers! Now, in these modern times of Web 2.0, the mainstream browser (the one from Microsoft) has evolved from a clunky competitor to rule the world, but the new alternative browsers are as important as ever. Problem is, they all have their peculiarities in how they respond to script commands, and now it’s back to the future in cross-browser coding…

There may be some disagreement now over the “correct” way to code web pages, but the reality is that anyone who aims to make a web site accessible to a wide audience will make sure it works correctly in Internet Explorer first, then may take the time to see that is works ok in other browsers, depending on their intended audience. One way to ensure compatibility is to limit the user experience to reading and navigating, and keeping the interaction and page layout as simple as possible. I could’ve taken that route, but that’s not the way of this site.

It has been interesting navigating the ins and outs of standards-compliant scripting and styling, at least as implemented by Mozilla. A welcome departure from the past was that by and large, changes made to accommodate Firefox also worked in IE, so code branching was kept to a minimum. Oh, there was still the occasional quirk, like brand F seems to include border thickness in an element’s width, while IE does not, but that can be handled with a global adjustment factor - see? I knew fudge factors would come into play at some point (see Jan 7th blog entry)

I also took this opportunity to get my feet wet with AJAX for the real-time statistics on the PixelList page. Well, I say that only because this is my first use of dynamic XML in a non-IE browser, so I’m using the XMLHttpRequest object native to Firefox. As it turns out, I’ve been using Javascript and XML (the JAX in AJAX) in IE for several years now, as a way to dynamically render sections of a page, so this is not all that new to me. Anyway, as the Asynchronous nature of AJAX (yes, that’s the first A) is not really necessary in this application (the content of the page has already loaded, it’s no big deal to wait for the server response with the stats XML), I think I may keep things simple and just use DJAX. Sorry, I don’t tend to go around swinging a sledgehammer to tap in a finishing nail, but at least I’ve got a feel for the tool, and it’s right there in my box in case I get the urge to build something more substantial.

Well, at least some of my goals for this site are being reached. Now I need some ads… Not to worry, the marketing machine has been working in the background, and may bear fruit in a week or so. Stay tuned…