[OPEN-ILS-DEV] ***SPAM*** Re: ***SPAM*** Re: ***SPAM*** Google Chrome Frame

[Mike Rylander]

On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 12:06 PM, Thomas Berezansky <tsbere at mvlc.org> wrote:
> I don't know about anyone else, but I feel like putting patches over things
> is more of a problem than a solution.

IMO, IE is the problem, but that's perhaps another debate altogether.  :)

>
> Many users won't use the button, either due to being lazy, not trusting
> installing things, or not being ABLE to. Limited users on home computers,
> work machines that are locked down, etc.
>
> Making IE support dependent on not supporting IE, basically, seems like the
> wrong approach to me. It WILL have to work without Google Chrome Frame for a
> lot of people, and not just because of those people's personal preferences.
>
> Thus, I say that if you think you can get around developing for IE by
> telling people to use a different browser, even via a plugin for IE, then
> you're wrong. Full stop.
>

Oh, no, I just think I, personally, will stop at minimal functional
support of IE. :)

I recently spent over 40 hours working around three significant
XML-handling deficiencies that exist in all released versions of
Internet Explorer.  If anyone wants to step up and improve IE support,
I'm all for it.  But, in my opinion (and remember, fever-induced
rambling), spending 40 hours on a 4 hour feature that every other
browser with more than 1% market share has no problem with is not a
tenable use of the limited resources in the Evergreen community.  The
options see to be: deliver features on the platforms where the cost of
development does not outweigh the benefit to the user, and not
(initially, anyway) where it does; or don't deliver the features at
all because IE is so painful to work in, but must be a first-class
delivery platform for any feature going into Evergreen's public
interfaces.  I prefer the former.

I'm biased in favor of standards -- silly me, I know! -- and not
steeped in the IE special-sauce culture, so I'm not going to be the
person who can do the IE special-sauce work, but if that person exists
and wants to help I will heartily encourage their participation!

> Having said that, having the patch offer a given person a one-time prompt
> that says Google Chrome Frame may improve speed and such with the install
> button, a cookie saying not to show it again if they say no for any reason,
> is perfectly fine in my eyes.
>

Thanks, Thomas.  I appreciate the feedback.  If/when this goes in I
will make sure to include just such a cookie.

> Thomas Berezansky
> Merrimack Valley Library Consortium
>
>
> Quoting Mike Rylander <mrylander at gmail.com>:
>
>> Developing any complex, dynamic web application that must support
>> Internet Explorer is several orders of magnitude more painful than it
>> should be, or would be without IE.  If you don't think so, you're
>> wrong.  Full stop.
>>
>> So, because IE is so broken, I'm very strongly inclined to add the
>> following patch (well, a better, configurable, I18N'd version of it)
>> to trunk in the near future.  What it does is, in IE, it gives the
>> user a button to click which will install Google Chrome Frame.  You
>> can read about it here:
>>
>> http://alex.dojotoolkit.org/2010/06/beta/
>>
>> Basically, it embeds the Google Chrome browser inside IE, and for web
>> sites that know how to request it, Chrome will render the page.  This
>> decreases page load time from 10s of seconds to 1s of seconds or
>> better, and allows standards-based functionality to actually work.
>>
>> Anyway, it could be the fever making me ramble incoherently, but I
>> think this may be the only thing left that can save my sanity when
>> building UIs for public consumption in Evergreen and FulfILLment.
>>
>> This patch is against trunk, but it should apply cleanly (or very
>> nearly) to 1.6 and 1.4.  If you test it out please respond to this
>> thread with any feedback.
>>
>> --
>> Mike Rylander
>>  | VP, Research and Design
>>  | Equinox Software, Inc. / The Evergreen Experts
>>  | phone:  1-877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457)
>>  | email:  miker at esilibrary.com
>>  | web:  http://www.esilibrary.com
>>
>
>
>



-- 
Mike Rylander
 | VP, Research and Design
 | Equinox Software, Inc. / The Evergreen Experts
 | phone:  1-877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457)
 | email:  miker at esilibrary.com
 | web:  http://www.esilibrary.com