Re: Living with legacy browsers

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tamouse pontiki wrote:
On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 8:36 AM, Lester Caine <lester@xxxxxxxxxxx> 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

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