Notes on Tumult Hype's cross-browser support, including the dreaded IE6(blog.tumultco.com)
blog.tumultco.com
Notes on Tumult Hype's cross-browser support, including the dreaded IE6
http://blog.tumultco.com/2012/05/15/notes-on-tumult-hypes-cross-browser-compatibility-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-almost-not-hate-ie6/
4 comments
You're correct, as many of these hacks to fall down in many cases or in unexpected ways. We've got hacks upon hacks to get them to work decently! These are items we (or tools) can manage though.
From our user perspective, non-transparent PNG in IE6 is the major problem. Partial transparency and 24-bit color support are vital for artist assets and not having them can influence the entire design.
From our user perspective, non-transparent PNG in IE6 is the major problem. Partial transparency and 24-bit color support are vital for artist assets and not having them can influence the entire design.
To each their own, but this sounds like an enormous nightmare in places. Did they do analysis to determine that support IE6 was worth the developer frustration or the large, large set of features they simply can't use (many of which pilif mentioned, in addition to those mentioned or implied in the article)?
I didn't spend time doing an analysis beforehand. I did IE8 support which was impossible to ignore given its ~30% market share at the time. A friend in our early alpha testing said she couldn't use our app unless it supported IE6 for her site. Since I valued her feedback I started hacking to see how difficult it would be, and got most features working that day. From our [controlled output] perspective, IE6 really isn't that much different than IE8. The end of the story is that she filed several critical bugs dealing with how we insulate our JavaScript against other scripts, so it was worth it from that perspective alone!
No. It's not. The. Biggest downfall is the total lack of advanced CSS selectors, forcing you into adding needless classes and/or additional non-semantic tags.
Also, IE 6 and 7 are full of bugs even in the little CSS they support. Transparent PNGs have been solved long ago. So have the various bugs, but the workarounds needed are much more painful to develop and maintain.
Using various libraries to patch in missing functionality only seems to work until you reach real-world complexity with your DOM at which point you will run into any of the countless performance issues with IEs JavaScript implementation which relies on COM marshaling for all of its DOM support, so all these patch-ie-to-add-missing-features-using-JS projects are practically nothing but nice demos.
The moment you can at least target IE 8 and you can start to rely on CSS having more ore less the intended effect without stacking hack upon hack, the moment you get to use stuff like display: table, that moment you will see how much you miss by staying in the late 90ies with the code you are writing.