I have a question for all the Radiant users out there…
Would anyone be left out if Radiant failed to support IE 6?
I am working on some UI/CSS improvements for Radiant which require hacks
and workarounds to support this browser. It can be done but I’m not
sure it’s worth it.
IE 8 is already in beta and IE 7 is freely available for all but Windows
2000 – and that OS is 8 years old (benefits of a public education right
there, baby). And Win2k can easily install Firefox, Opera, or Safari so
it’s not like they’re stuck.
Thoughts?
-Chris
P.S. Please don’t waste bandwidth with Microsoft or IE bashing (I’m not
interested in why everyone should use ). I just want to know whether it would be a problem for Radiant
admin users to need IE 7+.
I’m of the opinion that IE6 is going the way of the dinosaur. Unless
your client absolutely needs it, I would avoid bending over backwards
for it. IE6 support on the front-end is a different story (alas you may
need at least minimal support for it – still has approximate 25% market
share), but I think it’s reasonable to require modern browsers for the
admin UI.
Sean
I say release without IE6 support and then create a “Legacy Admin UI”
extension to add support for IE < 7, WebTV and other fringe user agents.
Adam
I vote we drop IE6 for the admin side.
Cheers,
Marty
On Sat, Jul 19, 2008 at 5:59 PM, Chris P.
I would dance a god damn jig.
Seriously though, I think public sites still need to support IE6. But
gated admin areas that have a small number of users, I think its fine
to declare IE7 the minimum. And, if we’re lucky, the rest of the
internet will follow suit.
-Alex
On Sat, 2008-07-19 at 20:35 -0600, Marty H. wrote:
I vote we drop IE6 for the admin side.
I agree with the hatred for IE, but I for one promise my clients to
support the current version of a browser and one version previous.
Currently, that means IE 6 and 7. In many corporate environments IE 6 is
still the only browser allowed in the office. I know it’s asinine, but
it’s true.
While I certainly don’t want to try and mandate which versions of
browsers that an open source project supports, I would like to suggest
that IE 6 not be dropped until version 8 is official. If you do kill
support for IE 6 could you please make an entry in the wiki describing
some of problems you were having with IE and mention where/how it might
be a problem even if you don’t make the fix. That way those of use that
still need to support v6 can do so without any further involvement from
the core group.
Of course that’s just my $0.02.
~Nate
Before there is more discussion on this, would it be possible for us
to get a list of problems that have arisen due to support for IE6? I
don’t really have a frame of reference for how much work it is to
maintain support. I personally think the best course of action would
be to extract any IE6-specific support in an extension that way those
that need it can have it with future versions of Radiant and help
maintain it themselves.
Regards,
Josh
Chris P. wrote:
Would anyone be left out if Radiant failed to support IE 6?
I vote against dropping IE6 support.
My rationale is a sad one: many enterprise clients in the Netherlands
(think governments, education institutes, healthcare, and the like)
typically have a locked-down and out-of-date workstation. Though they
aren’t likely to run Radiant for their main web presence, many smaller
internal groups can benefit from Radiant.
Only recently did one of my government clients upgrade from Windows 2000
and IE6 to Windows Vista and IE7. Many more will follow suit, but for
now I would suggest keeping IE6 support around for one more major
release.
Keeping it around for one more major release also provides room for
giving a deprecation announcement so developers can phase it out. And
who knows, somebody might actually pick up maintainership if he feels a
pressing need…
–
Roderick van Domburg
On Jul 21, 2008, at 8:01 AM, John W. Long wrote:
For now I think it is appropriate to drop support for IE6. We can
certainly accept a patch back to add it in latter, but I think it is
more important to get the new interface implemented than to quibble
over the details.
Thanks for being willing to work on this Chris.
I agree. But an IE 6 extension sounds like a good idea.
Chris, I’m trying to clear up my schedule to get more involved in the
new UI. Have you forked radiant-prototype or do you gave a public
location for ideas that you’re working on?
For now I think it is appropriate to drop support for IE6. We can
certainly accept a patch back to add it in latter, but I think it is
more important to get the new interface implemented than to quibble
over the details.
Thanks for being willing to work on this Chris.
–
John L.
http://wiseheartdesign.com
On Jul 21, 2008, at 10:38 AM, Chris P. wrote:
Time permitting, I’ll have it up by Wednesday.
Great! Send a message when you do, I’m eager to help.
Hello all. Thanks for the input. As John mentioned, I am beginning
work on the new Radiant UI, and my main goals are:
- It needs to function correctly
- I want the CSS/Markup to be as simple (understandable) as possible
as this is open source
- I want to produce something that won’t inadvertently break
(maintainer removes one line to change something only to learn
that that line was necessary as a browser hack)
Browser limitations/variations work against all of these (I’m currently
fighting with Firefox). I’m trying to find a happy (read:
“sane”)-medium and I wanted people’s take on things.
The consensus seems to be:
* Most could live without IE6 (no current users requiring it)
* Many/some could foresee a case where IE6 might be needed
So, I agree with John & Jim that we should shoot for IE 7+ support with
the ability to add in IE 6 as an extension. Besides, I’m working on
some of the harder parts now and it’s looking like PNG support may be
the only limitation (I had other ones in mind when I asked this question
but I think those may be working themselves out).
Jim G. wrote:
Chris, I’m trying to clear up my schedule to get more involved in the
new UI. Have you forked radiant-prototype or do you gave a public
location for ideas that you’re working on?
It didn’t make sense to fork John’s Radiant Prototype as that is really
a complete prototype of the existing UI. I have made a copy of it and
will be hosting it on GitHub here shortly (I’m trying to get the
_layout.haml file working so that the nav will be nailed down before
releasing).
Time permitting, I’ll have it up by Wednesday.
-Chris
Chris P. wrote:
Would anyone be left out if Radiant failed to support IE 6?
I vote to drop IE6 to coincide with the new Radiant UI release and move
IE6 support to an extension.
Please complain to Microsoft – they’re the only ones who can do
something about it.
Sean
On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 12:04 PM, David P. [email protected]
wrote:
Chris P. wrote:
Would anyone be left out if Radiant failed to support IE 6?
I vote to drop IE6 to coincide with the new Radiant UI release and move
IE6 support to an extension.
I vote the same.
And where can I register my extreme disgust for IE’s (lack of) CSS
support,
anyway?
–
Tim G.
On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 9:38 AM, Chris P. <
[email protected]> wrote:
So, I agree with John & Jim that we should shoot for IE 7+ support with the
ability to add in IE 6 as an extension. Besides, I’m working on some of the
harder parts now and it’s looking like PNG support may be the only
limitation (I had other ones in mind when I asked this
I always use pngfix.js to get IE6 to work with transparent png files and
it
works like a charm.
Find it here: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/bobosola/index.htm
~Nate
On 21-Jul-08, at 12:42 PM, Tim G. wrote:
I vote the same.
And where can I register my extreme disgust for IE’s (lack of) CSS
support,
anyway?
You could try the IE blog but /dev/null will be more effective.
Actually I suspect that when IE8 comes out the won’t be nearly as
craptacular as its ancestors and almost reach respectability. Passing
ACID 2 goes a long way in my books (by comparison to IE6).
On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 2:42 PM, Tim G. [email protected] wrote:
And where can I register my extreme disgust for IE’s (lack of) CSS support,
anyway?
If you are talking about IE6 then you have no place. And as for IE7 you
need
to know that the current Internet Explorer team is completely new as
Microsoft disbanded the IE team when it looked like they won “The Great
Browser War.” There are no IE6 team members on the current IE team, so
things will only get better from here. I think once IE 8 is released
into
the wild we (designers/developers) can finally start abandoning IE 6 in
earnest. Be thankful we don’t need to support 5.5 any more. ;^)
~Nate
I can get PNGs to work just fine with IE 6 via pngfix.js or just using
IE’s proprietary filters in the CSS. But you can’t do any fancy
positioning – just left/top aligned images for backgrounds.
There are other ways to skin that cat, so there should be a solution
there somewhere. I just don’t want to have to support or maintain it.
There will be other issues that crop up before we’re done, I’m sure.
-Chris