• 6 December 2010Today's update: fixes for Internet Explorer.

    After much tweaking and twitching... Internet Explorer support is now restored.

    While the site should work in IE6 with today's update, I am no longer supporting it. Future updates will be tested in Internet Explorer 8.

    Fixes:

    • Fixed mouseover highlight in the story edit area (which restores story edit functionality).
    • Tweaked stylesheet to show a dark background in the dialogs which use CSS3 properties not recognized by IE6/8.
    • Fixed minor bug with the "Go back" links on the Manage page.
    • Added a X-UA-Compatible meta tag, which may help when IE9 comes out of beta.
    • Clicking anywhere inside a table row on the "Remove Cards > Select from list" page now correctly checks that row for deletion (non IE specific).
    Much of the time was spent getting a proper testing environment, rather than changing the code.

    I must admit it was useful testing in IE as this highlighted problems that give no warning in other browsers/versions. For example the infamous trailing comma error was sufficient to break the review page in IE6.

    I would normally use jslint to detect such problems, but it is not automated so far. I use VIM, but even in Eclipse I never liked the way the automated syntax checking worked. It was just annoying, and slow.

    To solve this, I will add a new step in the website build to run the command line version of jslint on all javascript files.

    I'd like to thank member ivoSF who offered working Windows licenses. I realized I couldn't use them after all, so I ended up "recycling" my old Windows XP license. I figured that it had served me well (from late 2001 to late 2009 !), so I used it to install Windows XP into a virtual machine.

    When IE9 goes out of beta, I will be in trouble again, because it will not work in Windows XP. I will need another virtual machine with Vista or Windows 7. IE9 has a much better support for CSS3 and HTML5 however, so I may not need to test in IE9.

    Here is a great table that shows HTML5 and CSS 3 support accross browsers.

    With the last major update, I started using CSS3 properties like "border radius" and "box shadow". These properties have been widely supported for more than a year in Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari. Thankfully, they are finally going to be supported with IE9.

By Month