Weblog entry #156 for Steve
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There was a time when I disliked Javascript, and found it painful to work with.
Recently though I've been using it a fair bit, for the AJAX magic upon this site, and it is going suprisingly well.
Sure I don't test in many browsers, instead relying upon people to let me know if things are broken, but I've not run into too many problems.
Tonight's job was to make the tag cloud a little more dynamic. That went pretty quickly and there were no real errors - except for cached copies of my common javascript file.
I'm not planning on making any more user-visible changes to the site for a while - but if you have suggestions I'm prepared to listen and queue them - instead I want to continue to consolidate the database structure.
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k2
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Thanks for letting me know.
I tested in Firefox and Epiphany, but I don't have easy access to anything else ..
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k2
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Thanks!
It is nice to know that it works on most reasonable browsers. I'm happy to fix things even for IE, but without having a decent test environment it can take me a while to get things sorted out.
Thankfully there should be no more Javascript changes in the near future - the small tweaks I think are useful, but I don't want to add extra things just for the sake of it. Short of inline reply boxes I think we have everything covered now.
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Sometimes it looks good when one doesn't have to load a whole page to view something. AJAX can be fun. But when you hack into it so that some browsers just can't get it to display, it becomes a hopeless tool e.g. gmail in Konqueror. I'm happy with it till it does not force me to use a certain browser.
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It's a service that makes screenshots of your webpage as rendered by many different browsers running on many different OSes, with varying resolutions , javascript on and off...
It's not free, but they have a 24-hour evaluation period.
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That certainly works for testing out layouts - but it doesn't let you interact with the site(s) as far as I understand it ..
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Actually, it does, via vnc. But you'd probably be better off using xen to run an instance of another OS if you want to do that kind of testing regularly because of lag issues.
At a pinch IE5, 5.5 and 6 can be made to run in Debian under wine. Maybe even IE7 these days. Somewhat broken, but good for a quick test: ies4linux
PJ
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