On 2/19/2013 12:19 PM, Michael Schofield wrote:
Hey world,
I suppose I could start appending footnotes to my ranty emails.
Johnathan is definitely right regarding jQuery while I was
generalizing. Yes, jq1.8 will be supported - but, if you wanted to,
you could still run a site using jq1.4.
Dude, you are still spreading FUD. (Although I confused things more by
talking about 1.8 when I didn't mean 1.8 -- I meant 1.9, which will
support IE <9, and 2.0 which will not).
You COULD run a site on JQuery 1.4, but JQuery 1.4 is no longer
supported, and does not have the features that recent JQueries do.
This IS NOT THE SITUATION WITH JQUERY 1.9 VS 2.0. (NOTE WELL I had the
version numbers wrong before. It's 1.9 and 2.0 I am talking about, not
1.8 and 1.9) I put that in all caps because people seem to be
frequently misunderstanding this, and you are spreading misinformation
by making this comparison.
JQuery 1.9 will continue to be officially supported for the indefinite
future, it has no End of Life. And it will be supported with _feature
parity_ with 1.9. If they add new features to 2.0, they will add it to
1.9. 1.9 and 2.0 will be _simultaneous alternatives_. With 1.9
supporting IE <9, and 2.0 not. It is even encouraged that if you want
to support IE <9, you could deliver a JQ 1.9 to those IE, and a JQ 2.0
to everyone else -- and all your actual app code built on JQ should work
on either, the commitment is to make them identically compatible.
This has not happened with Jquery before is why it's confusing people.
It is NOT NOT NOT comparable to "you could still run a site using jquery
1.4."
http://blog.jquery.com/2013/01/14/the-state-of-jquery-2013/
First of all, let’s be very clear: The jQuery team does “worry about” IE
6/7/8, with jQuery 1.9. We’ve created a legacy-free jQuery 2.0 in order
to address the many situations where older versions of IE aren’t needed.
Some glorious day in the future, jQuery 2.0 will be the only version
you’ll need; until then we’ll continue to maintain jQuery 1.9.
The jQuery team is moving
beyond LT IE9 because losing the bloat is certainly more performant,
especially as the web scurries further away from high-speed
connections. Even now, many of us are supporting old IE by pulling in
additional stylesheets or scripts. The practice doesn't change if on
detection you choose to load jq1.8 instead of 2+. As the web moves
forward, the experience for old browser users will increasingly suck
- polyfills bust performance budget.
Google Apps / Play pulled support for IE8 on November 15. Link to
Techcrunch below. It's not fatal, but it's the same premise - IE8
users will get the "you should consider upgrading" message. It's the
beginning of the trend, but it's definitely a trend. I just
browserstacked my dusty G+ profile and there is a polite message. I
didn't see it on Calendar or Gmail. It more in-your-face on Play.
It's there and it's not. It works, it's gradual, but it's goading.
John's right, too, when he makes the point that the decision has a
lot to do with the difficulty / expense to support. The question to
me is if a library website is built by taxes and tuition, is there a
point where the redundant work for backward compatibility becomes a
disservice?
Michael // ns4lib.com
http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/14/google-apps-says-goodbye-to-internet-explorer-pulls-support-for-the-browser/
-----Original Message----- From: Jonathan Rochkind
[mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, February 19, 2013 11:57 AM
To: Code for Libraries Cc: Michael Schofield Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB]
A Responsibility to Encourage Better Browsers ( ? )
On 2/19/2013 10:22 AM, Michael Schofield wrote:
Now that Google, jQuery, and others will soon drop support for IE8
- its time to politely join-in and make luddite patrons aware.
IMHO, anyway.
I would like a cite for this. I think you are mis-informed. It is a
misconception that JQuery is dropping support for IE8 anytime soon.
And I'm not sure what you mean about 'Google' dropping support for
IE8.
[The mis-conception comes from the fact that JQuery 1.9 will not
support IE <9, HOWEVER, JQuery 1.8 will be supported indefinitely as
feature-complete-compatible with JQuery 1.9, and supporting IE <9.
JQuery 1.9 is just an alternate smaller JQuery without IE 8 support,
yeah, but JQuery 1.8 has no EOL and will be supported indefinitey
feature-complete with 1.9].
Anyway, I think it's clear that the web developer with our level of
resources can not afford to support every browser that may possibly
exist.
We have to decide on our list of browsers we will actually spend time
ensuring work with our code. (You can also, like JQuery-mobile, have
a list that's supported as 'first class', and another list that is
supported with graceful degredation -- and then others which you
don't look at at all, and may fail miserably/unusably).
That decision is generally based on a combination of popularity of
browsers among your users as well as difficulty (expense) to
support.
If you can politically get away with no longer supporting IE8 even
though it's popular among your users, I guess that could be legit. It
depends on your 'business needs', right?
Once you've decided to stop supporting a browser, especially one that
may be popular anyway, a secondary question is whether to let it just
silently potentially fail (you generally aren't spending time
analyzing whether it will in fact fail, work as intended, or degrade
gracefully -- that's part of the point), or actually sniff user
agents and give the user some sort of warning that your site may not
work with your browser.
If you are going to give a warning, I'd recommend it be a relatively
unobtrusive warning that still lets them proceed to use your site
anyway if they want to ignore your warning, rather than one that
locks them out.
