Re: [9fans] Gecko based web browser

["Matt" <matt@proweb.co.uk>]

> > Designers, esp. the newer ones, are quite happy to use script all over
the
> > place and I think that the web will become increasingly unusable to
> > non-script enabled browsers. I've just started at a new web design shop
and
> > many of the designers there don't even know about text only browsers and
as
> > such don't always design their sites to degrade gracefully. I hope to
> > educate my new co-workers.
> >
> Why not just encourage them, to the point where more computing power
> than would put man on the moon many times over is minimally essential
> to read a web page?
>
> Surely, there must be some way to exploit this insanity?  Or is it
> just part of the growing technological gap?

Actually I find client side scripting very useful.

It prevents round trips to the web server and utilises clock cycles
otherwise wasted on the client side.

On one project I use XML to store the details of the stories available and
display hidden DIV's containing the headlines when the section headers are
mouseovered (a new word :-?).
I only have to load the headlines into the browser once when the first page
is loaded and I cn re-arrange the order of the stories as necessary (by
date, author, category etc.) without any http requests.

Clients being able to manipulate a dataset and return the results to the
server is also useful
(or it will be as soon as I can find a use for it :)

I do recognise the technology gap but the desire to execute code on the
client is a strong one and as more people utilise it beyond simple
mouseovers it will become an enriching experience.

You can develop quite sophistcated applications with the DOM and a scripting
language it's just that people have shied away from it as yet in the
internet world and kept it in the the world of the intranet where the
browser platform can be specified. Sadly there are plenty of differences
between IE, Netscape and the upcoming Mozilla that make cross browser
implementations quite hairy (and I've been tackling then all day today -
things position differently in each browser even when specified by the
pixel!).

The days of chucking static html to the browser are leaving us and saying
"but all I want to do is display HTML so sod it" may well be valid for your
own site but increasingly you will be locked out of some of major web sites
and plenty of the minor ones coded by people who only test on IE.

Matt