Re: Living with legacy browsers

tamouse pontiki wrote:

On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 8:36 AM, Lester Caine <lester@lsces.co.uk> wrote:

The changes in styling on some of the php.net sub domains has flagged up a few questions. A lot of legacy systems are retained simply because they do have to work with legacy browsers, and a properly designed system where the content is maintained independent of the display/styling processing naturally allows a legacy view to be maintained in parallel with a more modern html5/css style sheet. But if the legacy system is still doing it's job is there any real incentive to waste time reworking something that is working fine? Most modern mobile devices handle legacy sites quite happily. Bring into the mix 'responsive', 'mobile' and other modern developments, and maintaining compatibility is something of a nightmare? Some of the modern css frameworks do address the problem, but I don't think that there is currently a good base to work from? Bootstrap has been used for the main php.net style, and while version 2 supported IE7, this has been dropped from version 3. Some elements of 'bodging' older versions if IE to be compatible with html5 are generally available. html5shiv.js is a fairly standard fix, and many of the frameworks provide .css fixes for various versions of IE. However these are only sticking plasters that need the new designs to pay lip service to the restrictions these fixes dictate. The current php.net sub domin updates fail on legacy browsers because of missing .css and style limitations. http://www.sitepoint.com/support-old-browsers-responsive-web-design/ is another nice piece of work which provides an alternative solution but has it's own set of restrictions, so we are now seeing sites like github simply telling people they have to update. Probably the right answer since IE has now dropped below 10% of the user base, with IE7 only 0.4%, but IE8 is still the most popular version and many of the fixes apply to both versions anyway with older versions of windows still command nearly 15% of the market. Basically the question is "Does anybody have a good option for a generically tidy cross browser css framework?" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSS_frameworks provides a starting point but lacks any compatibility detail. I'm currently using 'ink' but even that is not a full answer to the problems. --

Hey, Lester, good questions, all. I don't have the answer, really. I do make use of the site http://caniuse.com/ which tells you what features are available in which version of the main browser families. It is tedious to have to keep looking things up, though, and it's not something that I feel like I should have to do, but here we are.

There are a few good references like that but as you say, it is tedious going through checking things. Really what I'm looking for is a guide/framework that has already done the donkeywork. Cascade seems to have all bases covered, but I think that is achieved by ignoring some of the html5 enhancements and maintaining he older methods. This could well be the way things have to be done and allow new facilities to fall back gracefully. A bit like writing PHP scripts today that will still work cleanly with PHP5.2 hosting ;) Only think I need now is to replace the 'fontawsome' with the nice coloured icons my customers prefer :) -- Lester Caine - G8HFL ----------------------------- Contact - http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=contact L.S.Caine Electronic Services - http://lsces.co.uk EnquirySolve - http://enquirysolve.com/ Model Engineers Digital Workshop - http://medw.co.uk Rainbow Digital Media - http://rainbowdigitalmedia.co.uk