Section I.12. A Fragmenting World

I.12. A Fragmenting World

As you will see throughout this book, implementing DHTML applications that work equally well in Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Safari, and other modern browsers can be a challenge unto itself. Understanding and using the common-denominator functionality among the various pieces of DHTML will lead you to greater success than plowing ahead with a design for one browser and crossing your fingers that things will work in the others.

It is equally hazardous to use the W3C, ECMA, and other standards documents as your sole guides to implementing DHTML features in your applications. Browser support for every last detail of a standard is uneven at bestmore so if visitors to your pages use browsers even one generation old.

If the inexorable flow of new browser versions, standards, and authoring features teaches us anything, it is that each new generation only serves to fragment further the installed base of browsers in use throughout the world. While I'm sure that every reader of this book has the latest subversion of at least one browser installed, the imperative to upgrade rarely trickles down to all the users of yesterday's browsers. In fact, many corporate users are prohibited by their IT departments from upgrading or changing browers. If you are designing web applications for public consumption, coming up with a strategy for handling the ever-growing variety of browser versions should be a top priority. It's one thing to build a DHTML-based, context-sensitive pop-up menu system into your pages for IE 7 users when that's the browser you use. But what happens to users who visit with IE 5/Mac, Firefox, Safari, or Opera 8, or a pocket computer mini-browser, or Lynx?

There is no quick and easy answer to this question. So much depends on your content, the image you want to project via your application, and the browsers used by your intended audience (analysis of server logs can help here). If you set your sights too high, you may leave many visitors behind; if you set them too low, your competition may win over visitors with more engaging content and interactivity. Or, you could find yourself in the ideal situation: designing applications aimed at a single, organization-wide browser version.

It should be clear from the sheer size of Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference that those good old days of flourishing with only a few dozen HTML tags in your head are gone forever. As much as I'd like to tell you that you can master DHTML with one hand tied behind your back, I would only be deceiving you. Using DHTML effectively is a multidisciplinary endeavor. Perhaps it's for the best that content, formatting, and scripting have become separate enough to allow specialists in each area to contribute to a major project. For example, I've been the scripter on many such projects, while other teams handled the content and design. This is a model that works, and it is likely that it will become more prevalent, especially as each new browser version and standards release fatten the following pages in the years to come.