

Ask HN: Server-side rendering/proxy for website compatibility in IE5/6? - spolu

It looks like something useful for banks etc... and feasible even though that would probably feel &quot;slow&quot;.&lt;p&gt;One could send transcoded versions of a website with a renderer running on a server and gathering inputs from the client and applying it to the server-side rendered version?&lt;p&gt;Anyone heard of something similar to that?
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networked
WRP [1] implements exactly that and it works with browsers that are much older
than IE 5. The author has a write-up about how it got made with some curious
screenshots of ancient browsers at [2], [3] (parts one and two). One downside
to WRP is that because it uses images with an image map for the rendered pages
the content are not searchable.

There's also Opera Mini for Java ME. It reflows the websites for what screen
resolution it's running at, usually quite well, and gives you searchable text.
It's intended for featurephones but I once got a legacy version of it to run
on an old laptop with Linux for fun with Microemulator [4].

Of course, an administratively simpler option would be to have the old
machines access a server running the users' an entire desktop with a modern
browser, PDF viewer and the like using remote desktop software. I arranged
this kind of setup with a Linux server and a Windows client for a legacy
workstation at work and it proved quite usable. Out of all the major remote
desktop software that would run on old Windows (VNC clients, Remote Desktop,
NX) the RealVNC client proved the easiest on the client machine's CPU in our
setup.

If you had to absolutely make it happen from within the browser you could
employ a VNC Java applet but that would be to the detriment of user
experience. For security and privacy you can tunnel VNC over SSH.

[1] [http://www.tenox.net/out/#wrp](http://www.tenox.net/out/#wrp)

[2]
[http://virtuallyfun.superglobalmegacorp.com/?p=3866](http://virtuallyfun.superglobalmegacorp.com/?p=3866)

[3]
[http://virtuallyfun.superglobalmegacorp.com/?p=3910](http://virtuallyfun.superglobalmegacorp.com/?p=3910)

[4]
[https://code.google.com/p/microemu/downloads/list](https://code.google.com/p/microemu/downloads/list)

~~~
spolu
Thanks that's awesome.

~~~
networked
You're welcome. In case you want to try the Opera Mini trick: I've just looked
and found that the latest version I got to run was opera-
mini-4.4.31891-advanced-en.jar. Google the version number for downloads. To
run it get Microemulator and execute

    
    
      java -jar microemulator.jar opera-mini-4.4.31891-advanced-en.jad
    

Sorry for the mixed up sentences in my previous comment. I posted and then
edited it in-between things and didn't notice the mistakes until too late.

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[http://www.browserstack.com/](http://www.browserstack.com/)

Allows for the testing of internal and external URLs with a number of systems
including IE 6 on XP (but I don't see IE5 in the list)

