I'm almost annoyed
Apr. 11th, 2008 10:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
davidnI know that to a lot of people the sort of Firefox/general open source community seems like a terrifying place full of anti-corporate zealots with smelly beards, but in the end there's a very good reason for its existence. Today at work I spent four hours researching, experimenting and working around Internet Explorer bugs, on a new part of our system to allow people to select the members of teams that would vote on changes to a document. And as everyone who doesn't use it is making one six-billionth of my life easier, I thought I'd guilt trip people into converting over in case there's anyone reading this that still uses the abomination.
This is an entirely selfish thing - I'm ignoring the way that virtually every other browser is at least marginally faster than IE, free to download and more customizable (and in Firefox's case, leaks memory like a colander, but that's not as much of a disadvantage as you might think) because everyone's been told that already, and just concentrating on the advantage to me. And I'm not sure of the average technical Internet knowledge of my friends list, but I'll try not to talk down to anyone, provided that they haven't scrolled well away from this post by now.
The idea of the new form was simple (or so I thought). Our property-editing summary page gives you lists of the current people assigned to each team. From there, you can click "Edit team" to pop a window open where you can transfer more people into the team or take others out, then click "Submit", whereupon it'll close again, transferring the new contents of the "Selected" box into the original one. Dead easy (or it would be if most of Javascript didn't look like
But my problem (from Internet Explorer's point of view) was that I was using a rather handy way of telling web forms what to do called DOM, or Document Object Model. This lets you treat each part of a web page like individual objects, adding, deleting and editing them as you need. And for the most part, Microsoft is fine with you doing that, but on some computers (it doesn't even have the decency to be a consistent problem) you won't be able to move things between objects on different windows, and you'll get an error message saying "No such interface supported", which is naturally about as helpful as a water pistol in the Towering Inferno.
The way to fix this is apparently to re-register a couple of DLLs that may or may not be installed incorrectly, but you can hardly ask people to do that if they're the type that struggle with copy and pasting. Instead, I learned that Microsoft knew about their slight shortcomings in the field of sensible ways to handle webpages and had introduced a hackish fix - a made-up "innerHTML" property of each object on the page that you can use to directly edit the
Except... not only do they have a workaround to do something that everyone else has managed, they didn't get the workaround right either. Somewhere, it contains a bug that means that items in a select box may or may not be written correctly, and this rendered it pretty much useless for my purposes. In the end I resorted to detecting if someone was using IE, then building an array of arrays of strings that could hold everything I needed on the page, passing the whole thing under the table to the parent page through Javascript where IE couldn't mess it up and then cobbling together some items there from the collected data. Meanwhile, everything else can happily do it in about a hundred fewer lines.
Of course, the really frustrating thing is that our clients will never see this. Neither do most people who use IE and can't understand what everyone's complaining about. But it's the scourge of web developers everywhere for the reasons I've outlined above and more. So can you not do me a favour and download something else instead anyway? It'll take a minute of your time and I think you'll find it's rather better for other reasons, too. I don't even much care what you switch to - just as long as you realize that there's no reason on Earth to use IE7 unless you are actually being forced at gunpoint. Remember, like I said before you stopped reading this - everyone that switches over is making my existence just a tiny bit less stressful.
There, that should do it.
This is an entirely selfish thing - I'm ignoring the way that virtually every other browser is at least marginally faster than IE, free to download and more customizable (and in Firefox's case, leaks memory like a colander, but that's not as much of a disadvantage as you might think) because everyone's been told that already, and just concentrating on the advantage to me. And I'm not sure of the average technical Internet knowledge of my friends list, but I'll try not to talk down to anyone, provided that they haven't scrolled well away from this post by now.
The idea of the new form was simple (or so I thought). Our property-editing summary page gives you lists of the current people assigned to each team. From there, you can click "Edit team" to pop a window open where you can transfer more people into the team or take others out, then click "Submit", whereupon it'll close again, transferring the new contents of the "Selected" box into the original one. Dead easy (or it would be if most of Javascript didn't look like
$A().$('${sel2}');).But my problem (from Internet Explorer's point of view) was that I was using a rather handy way of telling web forms what to do called DOM, or Document Object Model. This lets you treat each part of a web page like individual objects, adding, deleting and editing them as you need. And for the most part, Microsoft is fine with you doing that, but on some computers (it doesn't even have the decency to be a consistent problem) you won't be able to move things between objects on different windows, and you'll get an error message saying "No such interface supported", which is naturally about as helpful as a water pistol in the Towering Inferno.
The way to fix this is apparently to re-register a couple of DLLs that may or may not be installed incorrectly, but you can hardly ask people to do that if they're the type that struggle with copy and pasting. Instead, I learned that Microsoft knew about their slight shortcomings in the field of sensible ways to handle webpages and had introduced a hackish fix - a made-up "innerHTML" property of each object on the page that you can use to directly edit the
<option value="it hurts">My old man's a dustman<option>-type tags that you'll see if you go to View/Page Source up on your menu bar. So the solution was obviously (though slightly inconveniently) to write the bits that needed to be transferred into the page manually and stick them in like that.Except... not only do they have a workaround to do something that everyone else has managed, they didn't get the workaround right either. Somewhere, it contains a bug that means that items in a select box may or may not be written correctly, and this rendered it pretty much useless for my purposes. In the end I resorted to detecting if someone was using IE, then building an array of arrays of strings that could hold everything I needed on the page, passing the whole thing under the table to the parent page through Javascript where IE couldn't mess it up and then cobbling together some items there from the collected data. Meanwhile, everything else can happily do it in about a hundred fewer lines.
Of course, the really frustrating thing is that our clients will never see this. Neither do most people who use IE and can't understand what everyone's complaining about. But it's the scourge of web developers everywhere for the reasons I've outlined above and more. So can you not do me a favour and download something else instead anyway? It'll take a minute of your time and I think you'll find it's rather better for other reasons, too. I don't even much care what you switch to - just as long as you realize that there's no reason on Earth to use IE7 unless you are actually being forced at gunpoint. Remember, like I said before you stopped reading this - everyone that switches over is making my existence just a tiny bit less stressful.
There, that should do it.
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no subject
Date: 2008-04-12 06:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-12 12:23 pm (UTC)I'm actually not sure what to recommend as an alternative given the restrictions of no search bar and no tabs - is even having them as a feature without having to use them a turn-off for you? Most things now have these as people who have got used to their presence would rather miss them.
http://www.alternativebrowseralliance.com/ is quite interesting, though.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-12 12:36 pm (UTC)Will have a look at link, if nothing jumps out then I will keep with IE6 until I am forced to change when I get a new laptop.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-20 02:05 am (UTC)You can switch between tabs in a window using Ctrl+Tab. Works in Firefox and IE and it's a lot tidier too, since you don't have to worry about any other applications open or the order changing as with Alt+Tab. And if you want to refer to a specific tab you can press Ctrl + 1 for the first tab, Ctrl + 2 for the second, etc. Tabs are for keyboard users too!
no subject
Date: 2008-04-12 03:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-13 11:02 am (UTC)My last computer had a slightly worse problem with IE: after using it for a couple of years, it just stopped working, completely - every time I tried to fire the thing up, it would freeze the computer. The only other time I'd had a similar problem was when my copy of MS Word died in a similar way (unusable, but at least had the good grace not to crash the computer); on that occasion even after I reinstalled the thing completely, it still didn't work.
What I've found is that a lot of people are too ignorant of computers to view them as tools that are supposed to meet their needs - they instead see them as things they have to work with, and around. So they assume that doing irrational things will somehow solve a problem (e.g. the girl who thought it might be possible to fix a problem where an image wasn't displaying correctly on a web page I was working on might be helped if the original photographer uploaded the image from their own computer), and in response to any other problem they'll just shrug their shoulders and say "oh, that's just how it works", instead of "why is this software causing problems for me; who were the idiots who programmed it and why can't we use something that actually works instead?". I suspect these might be the same people who vote Labour every time, even as things continue to get worse; it's quite a disturbing lack of imagination.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-13 02:00 pm (UTC)