

Notes on Tumult Hype's cross-browser support, including the dreaded IE6 - tumultco
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/

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pilif
> The biggest downfall of Internet Explorer 6-8 is lack of support for
> transparent PNGs.

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.

~~~
tumultco
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.

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drivebyacct2
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)?

~~~
tumultco
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!

