After hours of debugging, it appears to me that in FireFox, the innerHTML of a DOM reflects what is actually in the markup, but in IE, the innerHTML reflects what's in the markup PLUS any changes made by the user or dynamically (i.e. via Javascript).
Has anyone else found this to be true? Any interesting work-arounds to ensure both behave the same way?
I use jQuery's .html() to get a consistent result across browsers.
I agree with Pat. At this point in the game, writing your own code to deal with cross-browser compatibility given the available Javascript frameworks doesn't make a lot of sense. There's a framework for nearly any taste (some really quite tiny) and they've focused on really abstracting out all of the differences between the browsers. They're doing WAY more testing of it than you're likely to.
Something like jQuery or Yahoo's YUI (think how many people hit the Yahoo Javascript in a day and the variety of browsers) is just way more road-tested than any snippet you or I come up with.
using a good library is a great way to get around browser inconsistencies, and jquery is the one that I typically recommend - and if you're running into issues altering the elements in a form in particular, jquery boasts a few really useful plugins focused specifically on form manipulation and evaluation.
Using prototype and the $("thisid") syntax instead of document.getElementById("thisid") might do the trick for you. It worked for me.
Related
I found this little bit of code over at devloper.Mozilla.
addEventListener compatibility
Does that code on that page look like it's viable to make addEventListener cross browser?
I don't really have any access to a bunch of old browsers to test it so I thought I'd ask here first.
All new browsers support addEventListener so it's not too big of a deal. I'm just interested in what's available to provide functionality to old browsers and if Mozzilla's shim is worthy.
I like libraries like jQuery, YUI and prototype, and I know that's an option to make events easier(as it is with all js libraries) so think of this question as academic. For the spirit of learning.
The code you've linked to looks decent and as far as I know it should work. If I were you however I would start by diving into jQuery source to look for how they are doing it, since jQuery is under constant development, unlike (assuming) example from developer.Mozilla.
Replace jQuery with any other library you're feeling comfortable with looking into.
This is kind of a two-part question.
Why does IE require so much special treatment when handling Javascript? And are there any tricks, resources, and/or systems you have picked up for making your js IE-compatible, besides Firebug lite?
Using standardised libraries like J-query so you don't have to jump through all the hoops yourself works on the javascript side!
Also Yahoo User Interface (YUI) is good for making websites look extremely similar over different browsers. Their Grids library works really well.
Could you please elaborate little what you're referring to?
JavaScript in it's core is have mainly been the same the last 10 years. If you're worried about older IE versions (IE6-7) you can remain calm. IE6 was released with JavaScript 1.5 support so all JS code should run fine. Mozilla has a very good JS ref document at their MDC site. At the bottom of each page there's usually a list of what version of each browser that supports that specific function.
However the difference between browser usually lies in the DOM implementation or event handling. Where properties may have different names, at the top of my head these properties mainly are related to element/scroll positions.
To find the correct property to use, check in the developer tool (Firebug in IE, Developer Tools in Webkit or Developer Toolbar in IE) for that browser to find what you are looking for. If you're unsure set at JavaScript breakpoint in your code using the debugger;keyword or send something to the console using console.log(). In IE Developer Toolbar is available from IE8+ (I think).
Most of these problems are already resolved in the major JavaScript frameworks like jQuery, MonoTools and so on.
The two main "special treatment" things that come to mind are:
Events. Including assignment of event handlers, the way the event object is made available to the handler function, and some of the properties of the event object. See this page for more info: http://www.quirksmode.org/js/introevents.html
Ajax. Use of XMLHttpRequest versus ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP").
Most everything else should be fine.
You can write yourself some (relatively) simple helper functions to get around these issues, or use a library like jQuery that normalises the differences for you. If you do write it yourself, be sure to test for feature support rather than try to test for which browser - see this (long) article for an explanation: http://jibbering.com/faq/notes/detect-browser/ (I'm sure there are shorter explanations around but I can't be bothered finding one.)
If you using jquery in your page then you can check for ie with this code
if ($.browser.msie && $.browser.version == '6.0') {
//do IE specific code
}
This code will only run when the user browser will be IE 6.0 or you leave this condition
I am working on a project to convert a web site that is fully functional in Internet Explorer 8 and lower, but does not work well in Firefox or Safari.
A lot of what will need to be changed is going to be javascript-related (aka methods that exist in IE but not in other browsers).
What I want to know is whether anyone is aware of a fairly comprehensive list of common things that have to be changed to work accross all browsers.
I am starting with quirksmode.org but I don't think it will have quite everything I'm looking for. If anyone knows of a list please let me know.
Your best option here is to go with a Javascript toolkit/library like jQuery, MooTools or Prototype. Such a decision will save you a monstrous amount of work, and all three are constantly being updated which gives you a large degree of safety against future compatibility issues. Especially for DOM manipulation or AJAX, a library is the way to go.
If you absolutely mustn't use one, quirksmode is a good start. I've never found any single source that is comprehensive enough to keep me from running back to Google for each problem area.
Quite honestly, if you don't have lots of experience doing cross-browser development, I suspect the best way to fix your app is to set up a good test environment on each target browser and starting finding where it breaks. You're eventually going to have to test it on each target browser anyway, so you might as well start there. Once you find out what code is failing you for a particular bug, you can do more targeted searches for how to work around that issue in a cross browser way.
You will, over time, build up a good internal knowledge base of what is safe to use in a cross browser way and what is not. Even experienced developers still run into new issues on every project that are only found with testing. One advantage of experience though is that you start to learn when to suspect that something might or might not have cross browser issues and either avoid it (find a safer way) or explicitly test it in several browsers before you use it.
I find that http://jsfiddle.net is awesome for creating very efficient self-contained test cases to either proactively try something in other browsers or to troubleshoot something that's been giving you a problem.
As others have said, one huge advantage of the various browser libraries like jQuery or others is that they have solved a lot of these compatibility issues for you and, in general, if they document a function in the library and don't explicitly warn you about cross-browser issues, then they've already done their homework to make it safe for you.
You may also find out that using a javascript framework such as jQuery, ExtJs, Prototype, Mootols, ... would be very beneficial in writing cross browser javascript.
a web site that is fully functional in Internet Explorer 8 and lower,
but does not work well in Firefox or Safari
I would strongly recommend to develop with a browser that meets the standards (e.g. CSS3).
The process should rather be: to develop with FireFox or Chrome - and fix all IE versions later on.
Well, this is my daily bread... and ordinary it's IE b*tch which makes me loose time...
I'm not a JavaScript wiz, but is it possible to create a single embeddable JavaScript file that makes all browsers standards compliant? Like a collection of all known JavaScript hacks that force each browser to interpret the code properly?
For example, IE6 does not recognize the :hover pseudo-class in CSS for anything except links, but there exists a JavaScript file that finds all references to :hover and applies a hack that forces IE6 to do it right, allowing me to use the hover command as I should.
There is an unbelievable amount of time (and thus money) that every webmaster has to spend on learning all these hacks. Imagine if there was an open source project where all one has to do is add one line to the header embedding the code and then they'd be free to code their site per accepted web standards (XHTML Strict, CSS3).
Plus, this would give an incentive for web browsers to follow the standards or be stuck with a slower browser due to all the JavaScript code being executed.
So, is this possible?
Plus, this would give an incentive for web browsers to follow the standards or be stuck with a slower browser due to all the JavaScript code being executed.
Well... That's kind of the issue. Not every incompatibility can be smoothed out using JS tricks, and others will become too slow to be usable, or retain subtle incompatibilities. A classic example are the many scripts to fake support for translucency in PNG files on IE6: they worked for simple situations, but fell apart or became prohibitively slow for pages that used such images creatively and extensively.
There's no free lunch.
Others have pointed out specific situations where you can use a script to fake features that aren't supported, or a library to abstract away differences. My advice is to approach this problem piecemeal: write your code for a decent browser, restricting yourself as much as possible to the common set of supported functionality for critical features. Then bring in the hacks to patch up the browsers that fail, allowing yourself to drop functionality or degrade gracefully when possible on older / lesser browsers.
Don't expect it to be too easy. If it was that simple, you wouldn't be getting paid for it... ;-)
Check out jQuery it does a good job of standardizing browser javascript
Along those same lines explorercanvas brings support for the HTML5 canvas tag to IE browsers.
You can't get full standards compliance, but you can use a framework that smooths over some of the worst breaches. You can also use something called a reset style sheet.
There's a library for IE to make it act more like a standards-compliant browser: Dean Edwards' IE7.
Like a collection of all known
javascript hacks that force each
browser to interpret the code properly
You have two choices: read browser compatibility tables and learn each exception a browser has and create one yourself, or use avaiable libraries.
If you want a javascript correction abstraction, you can use jQuery.
If you want a css correction abstraction, you can check /IE7/.
I usually don't like to use css corrections made by javascript. It's another complexity to my code, another library that can insert bugs to already bugged browsers. I prefer creating conditional statements to ie6, ie7 and such and create separate stylesheets for each of them. This approach works and doesn't generate a lot of overhead.
EDIT: (I know that we have problems in other browsers, but since IE is the major browser out there and usually we need really strange hacks to make it work, css conditional statements is a good approach IMO).
Actually you can,there are lots of libraries to handle this issue. From the start of the time, javascript compliance issue always was a problem for developers and thanks to innovative ones who developed libraries to get over this problem...
One of them and my favorite is JQuery.
Before JavaScript 1.4 there was no global arguments Array, and it is impossible to implement the arguments array yourself without a highly advanced source filter. This means it is going to be impossible for the language to maintain backwards-compatibility with Netscape 4.0 and Internet Explorer 4.0. So right out I can say that no, you cannot make all browser standards compliant.
Post-netscape, you can implement nearly all of the features in the core of the language in JavaScript itself. For example, I coded all methods of the Array object in 100% JavaScript code.
http://openjsan.org/doc/j/jh/jhuni/StandardLibrary/1.81/index.html
You can see my implementation of Array here if you go to the link and then go down to Array and then "source."
What most of you are probably referring to is implementing the DOM objects yourself, which is much more problematic. Using VML you can implement the Canvas tag across all the modern browsers, however, you will get a buggy/barely-working performance in Internet Explorer because VML is markup which is not a good format for implementing the Canvas tag...
http://code.google.com/p/explorercanvas/
Flash/Silverlight: Using either of these you can implement the Canvas tag and it will work quite well, you can also implement sound. However, if the user doesn't have any browser plugins there is nothing you can do.
http://www.schillmania.com/projects/soundmanager2/
DOM Abstractions: On the issue of the DOM, you can abstract away from the DOM by implementing your own Event object such as in the case of QEvent, or even implementing your own Node object like in the case of YAHOO.util.Element, however, these usually have some subtle changes to the standard API, so people are usually just abstracting away from the standard, and there is hundreds of cases of libraries that abstract away.
http://code.google.com/p/qevent/
This is probably the best answer to your question. It makes browsers as standards-compliant as possible.
http://dean.edwards.name/weblog/2007/03/yet-another/
This is not a new topic, but I am curious how everyone is handling either .js or .css that is browser specific.
Do you have .js functions that have if/else conditions in them or do you have separate files for each browser?
Is this really an issue these days with the current versions of each of the popular browsers?
It's a very real issue. Mostly just because of IE6. You can handle IE6-specific CSS by using conditional comments.
For JavaScript, I'd recommend using a library that has already done most of the work of abstracting away browser differences. jQuery is really good in this regard.
Don't write them?
Honestly, browser specific CSS is not really necessary for most layouts - if it is, consider changing the layout. What happens when the next browser comes out that needs another variation? Yuck. If you have something that you really need to include, and it doesn't seem to be working in one browser, ask a question here! There are lots of great minds.
For JS, there are several frameworks that take care of implementing cross-browser behaviour, such as jQuery (used on this site).
The IE conditional comments have the downside of an extra file download. I prefer to use a couple of well-known CSS filters:
.myClass {
color: red; // Non-IE browsers will use this one
*color: blue; // IE7 will see this one
_color: green; // IE6 and below will see this one
}
(Yeah, it won't validate, but last I checked, our money comes from users and advertisers, not from the W3C.)
It is still an issue these days for CSS not working in all browsers (mostly IE6/7).
I've never needed a separate JS file for anything I've worked on. If you are using a JS library (jQuery, YUI, Prototype, etc), 99% of your browser incompatibilities will be taken care of.
As for CSS, I prefer to stick my browser-specific fixes in the same CSS file. It makes it a lot easier to debug when you only have to look in 1 place for your styling. You could spend hours debugging something only to find out the bug is caused by your 10 line browser-specific stylesheet.
It's also better from a performance perspective to only have 1 CSS and 1 JS file.
Use what is known as "feature detection".
For example, if you want to use document.getElementsByClassName, do the following:
if(document.getElementsByClassName) {
// do something with document.getElementsByClassName
} else {
// find an alternative
}
As for CSS, you should largely be good if you use standards, except in IE. In IE, use conditional comments - it's the method recommended by the guys at Microsoft.
Personally I've mostly used conditional comments as noted above.
In the Stackoverflow podcast, though, Jeff indicated that Stackoverflow is using Yahoo's CSS Reset, which I'd never heard of. If it does what it's advertised to do it seems that would resolve many (most? all?) browser-based CSS differences; I don't see anything indicating conditional commenting in the Stackoverflow html source, at least. I'm definitely going to play with it on my next web project and would love to hear anyone's experiences with it.
As far as Javascript; as has already beed said, use your favorite JS Framework...
I use a framework to handle 99% of the xbrowser stuff.
For everything not covered in the framework, I'd use a if/else or a try/catch.
Both if/else and separate files, it depends on the complexity of the site.
There are definitely still incompatibilities between browsers, so consider letting a JavaScript Framework do the dirty work for you...
jQuery
http://jquery.com/
Dojo
http://www.dojotoolkit.org/
Script.aculo.us
http://script.aculo.us/
Prototype
http://prototypejs.org/
I use the built in functions of jQuery for the actual detection:
jQuery.each(jQuery.browser, function(i, val) {});
As for organization, that would depend on your application. I think putting this in an initialization code and then using the detection where you need it would be best. I still have issues where I have to detect Explorer on occasion. For example, when using jQuery, I have found that the parent() and next() functions will sometimes have different meanings in Explorer compared to Firefox.
Internet Explorer has conditional constructs like
<!--[if IE]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="ie.css" />
<![endif]-->
that will let you bring in specific style sheets and JavaScript just for IE. I consider this a solution of last resort if there are no standards-compliant ways to deal with a problem.
If you are doing ASP.Net development, you can also use Device Filtering (which I just learned about here on Stack Overflow today).
You can use it on your Page Directives to link in different skins, master pages, or CSS files, but you can also use on ASP.Net server control attributes, like this:
<asp:Label runat="server" ID="labelText"
ie:CssClass="IeLabelClass"
mozilla:CssClass="FirefoxLabelClass"
CssClass="GenericLabelClass" />
That example is, of course, a bit extreme, but it does let you work around some nasty browser inconsistencies while using only a single CSS file.
I also second the idea of using a CSS reset file and definitely use a library like jQuery instead of reinventing the wheel on JavaScript event and DOM differences.
I think conditional comments are great for style sheets but they can also be used for javascript/jquery.
Since the .browser has been deprecated and now removed from jquery 1.9 (?) using conditional comments is a pretty good way to do browser specific javascript.
here is my quick example:
1 - Place a conditional comment somewhere on the page. I personally put it right after the body tag. I've seen people use it on the actual body or html but that brings back the IE8/9/10 comparability view button and you want to avoid this if possible.
<!--[if lt IE 9]><div class="ie8-and-below"></div><![endif]-->
2 - then use jquery to check if our IE specific container is there.
if ($("div").hasClass("ie8-and-below")) {
//do you JS for IE 8 and below only
}
3 - (optional) set your target comparability and put something like:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=10" />
right after the <head> tag. (it has to be the very 1st thing after the opening <head>).
This will turn off the compatibility button in ie10/9/8 if the rest of your page is properly coded. It's a good fail safe if you have sections that require comparability mode, other ways you may trigger your JS if running a newer browser in compatibility.
Note: As of the date of this post the http-equiv does not validate W3C standards but it's a very useful tag which has been adopted by the home pages of google and microsoft among others. I think it's only because W3C is a bit behind on adopting it.