[wp-hackers] AJAX on Widgets Page Should Gracefully Degrade

[Christopher J. Hradil]

 Personally, although I know the widgets/ajax is easier, I've been more
inclined to hand code things myself for clients rather than rely on
something like the widgets plugin. In addition, unless absolutely necessary,
as time goes on I purposely avoid using  javascript as much as possible, and
when I do use it I like to simplify things as much as possible and make sure
that it is compatible with (or at least doesn't cause a user identifiable
issue with) the major browsers. That being said, AJAX has tremendous
potential as a tool, developers of any JavaScript code need to be mindful of
standards compliance which I know isn't always easy or possible when trying
to accomplish a specific task. 

It is clear that globally (in other words not only in relationship to
wordpress), moving forward much more web and intranet development than ever
(and I believe eventually, the majority of,) will be standards based and
compliant. I've spent a large amount of time devoted to and guiding clients
towards this end for at least the past 6 or 7 years. It's not always easy,
many folks are resistant to make major migrations and changes needed to
bring things up to speed. I think the fact that MS for example with the
release of IE 7 has embraced completely the w3c standards and accepted them
as presented speaks volumes about the need for folks to not only be more
aware of standards compliance, but work towards adopting them in all future
efforts. MS also has recently released a new development environment called
MS Expression Web Designer (along with other Expression suite tools), which
completely adhere to things like the w3c XHTML and CSS standards. 

Personally, as an independent consultant I was a MS certified solutions
provider from 1995-2002, however, beginning in around 1997 I abandoned most
MS related development work in favor of migrating to open source and
standards compliance due to the extremely proprietary direction things were
headed at MS at the time. I know that I made the correct choice. Almost
every MS server environment has failed to be as widely deployed as they
expected, and my belief is that that's due to the proprietary "spin" they
put on everything. It's clear that the MS direction has finally changed, so
it seems to me pretty short sighted and irresponsible for any serious
developer/consultant, etc not to embrace and accept the fact that in
designing new tools, careful attention must be paid to global standards. 

...chris 


/**************************************
Christopher J. Hradil
chradil at comcast.net
http://www.hradil.us/t 
**************************************/


-----Original Message-----
From: wp-hackers-bounces at lists.automattic.com
[mailto:wp-hackers-bounces at lists.automattic.com] On Behalf Of Computer Guru
Sent: Wednesday, June 14, 2006 12:39 PM
To: wp-hackers at lists.automattic.com
Subject: [wp-hackers] AJAX on Widgets Page Should Gracefully Degrade

There needs to be a graceful degrading for the widgets page:
IE7 & Bon Echo Alpha 3 both choke on the (highly buggy) JS employed on the
AJAX Widgets control.

Seeing as these are the very latest builds of the two most popular
browsers.. and that they are actually standards compliant (yes, even IE)
that says a lot.

 

Regards,

 

Computer Guru

NeoSmart Technologies <http://neosmart.net/> 

http://neosmart.net/blog/

 

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