[ILUG] [A little OT] the OpenIreland response to Minister Hanafin

[John Allman]

Colm MacCarthaigh wrote:

>On Thu, May 06, 2004 at 10:52:54AM +0100, John Allman wrote:
>  
>
>>Although i'm sure your piano thing worked a charm, i don't believe it's 
>>possible to write code that will work for every browser in every 
>>situation. Things like workarounds for buggy css implementations can be 
>>troublesome when you're doing nasty things with layers. I've written 
>>code that does no silly checks and works, but i dont believe that's 
>>possible for everything you want to do in javascript atm. So i guess i'd 
>>argue that that day is yet to come.
>>    
>>
>
>That's quite different from wanting to be able to write any ammount of
>Javascript and feel confident it will work. Yes there are things that
>only work in certain browsers, jscript contains a ton of IE-only
>extentsions and there are other aspects which are broken .. but the
>solution is to design around them, not use them and to find alternate
>solutions. 
>  
>
Perhpas i phrased myself badly, and certainly in the ideal world the 
solution would be to design around them. But there are things which, by 
your own admission, cannot be done completely without working around 
bugs and implementation differences. In other words if someone tells you 
they want a site to look a certain way and do a certain thing, there is 
no guarantee that  designing around the problems is possible if you want 
to meet the requirements. So you end up coding around the problems instead.

I'll admit that it does sound like some of the things i've done might be 
possible to do in a non-hacky way if i had done more research. But 
sometimes one is under time constraints too...

>Interestingly, with the advent of the Javascript 1.2 standard it
>actually became provably possible to do pretty much anything in
>Javascript. Since 1) the core of the language is Turing-complete 2) it's
>possible to divide the browser-window into a 1 pixel granularity matrix
>of rollover images and 3) it's possible to trap input,  the only limit
>on what you can do is the amount of memory and CPU available to you. In
>theory, you could write and display an entire Operating system in fully
>portable Javascript. Though obviously here I'm being deliberately
>ridiculous.
>  
>
This is quite interesting indeed

thanks,

John