Section I.2. Version Headaches


I.2. Version Headaches

As a further complication, there are the inevitable prerelease versions of browsers and standards. Browser prereleases are sometimes called "preview editions" or "beta" versions. While not officially released, these versions give you a chance to see what new functionality will be available for content rendering and control in the next-generation browsers. Authors who follow browser releases closely sometimes worry when certain aspects of their current pages fail to work properly in prerelease versions. The fear is that the new version of the browser is going to break a carefully crafted masterpiece that runs flawlessly in earlier released versions of the browser.

Prerelease browsers are valuable resources for content developers. On the one hand, testing existing content on a preview release allows you to uncover bugs in the browser before the browser is released. Report those bugs! Wherever possible, provide a simple test case (or link to a test case) that proves the bug so that the browser engineers can see exactly what you mean and test their fixes against real code. On the other hand, testing may allow you to learn about the rare case in which a feature you rely on is removed or changed (usually to meet a standard definition). While browsers tend to be backward compatible with previous versions, many developers were caught unaware, for instance, when the Mozilla browser (successor to Netscape 4), in its effort to adopt industry standards, completely dropped support for a couple of popular, but non-standard, features implemented in Netscape 4. Similarly, Internet Explorer 7 fixed a bug that many content authors had previously relied on to help differentiate browser brands. Developers who tested preview versions of the browsers in question would have learned of these important changes early in the process, and planned for the new deployment ahead of time.

Avoid the urge, however, to modify your public HTML or scripting code to accommodate what may be a temporary bug in a prerelease version of a browser. Any page visitor who uses a prerelease browser does so at his or her own risk. If your pages are breaking on that browser, they're probably not the only ones on the Web that are breaking. A user of a prerelease browser must understand that using such a browser for mission-critical web work is as dangerous as entrusting one's Great Novel to a beta version of a word processing program.

On the standards side, working groups usually publish prerelease (draft) versions of their standards. These documents are very important to the people who build browsers and authoring tools. The intent of publishing a working draft is not much different from making a prerelease browser version public: to get as many concerned netizens as possible looking over the material to find flaws or shortcomings before the standard is finalized.

Speaking of standards, it is important to recognize that the final releases of these documents from standards bodies are called not "standards" but "recommendations." Content authors find, to their dismay, that browser makers don't always interpret details of recommendations the same way. You will also find details within a recommendation that are optional, thus allowing a browser maker to claim full compliance, even when not every feature is implemented.

No law or contract forces browser makers to implement recommendations in full. Fortunately, from a marketing angle, it plays well to the web development audience that a company's browser adheres to the "standards." Eventuallyafter enough release cycles of both standards and browsers allow everyone to catch up with each other, and older, less standards-compliant browsers fall into disuseour lives as content creators should become easier. Unfortunately, the fulfillment of that dream seems eternally to be five years in the future.

In the meantime, the following sections provide brief evolutionary histories of the various standards, and their implementation in major browsers, as they relate to the technologies that affect DHTML.




Dynamic HTML. The Definitive Reference
Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference
ISBN: 0596527403
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 120
Authors: Danny Goodman

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