Posted by Vicente Werner on 05/11/05 10:34

On 5/11/05, Marcus Bointon <marcus@synchromedia.co.uk> wrote:
> I did say that I'd be happy with IE6 only, which has remained
> unchanged for nearly 4 years. How much more stable do you want it?
For starters, If it worked just for IE 6, IE 5.5 and Ie 5 I'll be kind
of happy because that will make the 85% of all the traffic my clients
get. But for stable I mean also reproduciable, something I've found to
be non exact in many cases: sometimes a js validation just fails to
work for some ie glitch, and then you close & re open the window and
works ok again.

> With that defeatist attitude you can never use JS for anything.
I'm realistic, but if the client wants it, he get's it.

> IE6
> doesn't conform to some W3C specs - looks like we'll have to scrap
> HTML and CSS too. Firefox fails Acid2? Better dump that as well.
Don't take the things out of context, js is not stable even among IE
versions (mozilla is also has it's differences!) and it's not necesary
in many cases, while html & css are the base technologies you've to
deal with, trying to avoid potential problems, or just work around
them.

> You're using gmail, which is about as complex as JS gets, yet it
> works quite nicely in a large proportion of browsers.
Well, as for dhtml interfaces are, gmail is probably the simplest one,
having seen many pages that look more like flash scripts than dhtml.
(spanair.es for example, also a perfect example on how things one day
work & another don't -with IE 6- )

> So google
> should can it because it doesn't all work in lynx?
If they want to use it, I'm not the one that will say no to them.

> If I can do client-side
> validation reliably in IE6, which is used by 90% of my visitors,
Well, that's your case, mine is that just over 40% of my visitors use
IE 6, 30% IE 5.5 and 15% IE 5 (fresh stats from this morning), so I'm
probably in a very different scenario because of the amount of legacy
machines still in use in spain.

> there is no reason to deny it to them because some small proportion
> of the remaining 10% might have trouble, especially as it's trivial
> to disable it altogether for them (Except for the compulsory idiot
> running Opera3 with an IE6 agent string).
As I said, you're in a different scenario than I, if you've 90% of IE
6, it's your decision.
> I think you're just not getting what I'm on about. What I'm asking
> for is to write ONE piece of code that's probably quite similar to
> what you'd already do with SmartyValidate, and have it render output
> for both client and server. It's doing double the work for the same
> amount of coding effort. Sure, it needs a well-tested JS library to
> build on (qforms would do nicely), but once bundled into a nice
> Smarty extension, the API should be simple. I agree that coding it
> all manually twice is a silly idea - that's why I started this thread.
Still the extension will have to generate a lot of js specific stuff
and it'll be a mess to debug but if you're for it, please do it, I'll
even help since I've done myself an extension much like smarty
validate to do server side validation -just because it fitted better
with my hierachical & componentized rendering system-

> But from what you've been saying, it's no use at all because
> somewhere there may be one browser that it doesn't work in, even if
> you only explicitly enable it in those that do.
I'm not speaking of just one browser, but of all the small
inconsistencies, glitches etc.. that are in all javascript
implementations that I know of.

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