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The OpenAjax Alliance has been working with some of the top Ajax developers on a wishlist that aims at gathering and prioritizing the development features that we need the most from next generation browsers. The process is completely open and Wiki-based, so feel free to contribute. http://www.openajax.org/blogs/wp-trackback.php?p=53 Read More...
For some reason, there is no standard API to get the pixel coordinates of a DOM element relative to the upper-left corner of the document. APIs only exist to get coordinates relative to the offset parent. Problem is, it's very important to get those coordinates for applications such as drag and drop, or whenever you need to compare coordinates of elements that may be in completely different parts of the document. In Microsoft Ajax, we implemented such a function but it proved to be one of the most difficult problems we had to solve. Not so surprisingly, every single browser has its own coordinate quirks that make it almost impossible to get the right results with just capability detection. This is one of the very rare cases where we reluctantly...
When we built the history management feature in ASP.NET Futures, we spent considerable time experimenting with the different behaviors of the main browsers out there. The problem with such a feature is that it has to rely on a number of hacks because browser vendors basically never anticipated this need. Now they're thinking about it, so all this may be simplified in a few years, but in the meantime, it's a very complicated feature to build. One of the things that struck me was how little reliable literature is available on the subject. There is a lot of partial information, lots of false or unverified information, but very little that's really comprehensive, reliable and up to date. Good references I found include Brad Neuberg's Really Simple...
One thing that really stands out in the Windows version of Safari is that it's exactly identical to the Mac version, almost down to the pixel level . That must have been quite a pain to achieve, and it would probably have been way easier to use the OS for many things. Does Apple really think PC users will go "gee, that Mac UI is really sweet, I think I now have an uncontrollable urge to buy a Mac"? Probably not. So here's my hypothesis: Safari for Windows is not intended to take over the Windows browser market, nor is it a showcase for the wonderful-mac-ui-that-if-only-we-knew-it-would-make-us-all-switch. It's an emulator . Its one and only purpose is to make sure that devs who work on PC can build apps that will run on the iPhone and on the...
The first thing most web developers probably thought this morning when they learned about Safari for Windows was "oh man, yet another browser to test in". And yes, for the moment, that's what it amounts to. Coincidentally, I have spent a good part of last week making the history management in Microsoft Ajax work in Safari 2.0.4. I got it to work fine (after much Apple cursing), so the first thing I tried after I downloaded Safari 3 beta was my history tests. And sure enough, it breaks in new, unexpected ways. History management is pretty much a big hack that is different on about all browsers (Firefox and Opera are the nicest ones here, with predictible, similar behaviors). And sure enough, Safari 3 brings a totally unheard of model. I didn...
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