Backwards compatibility, HTML Overlays, legacy browsers, future of HTML
By glazou on Tuesday 7 September 2004, 10:01 - Standards - Permalink
Gerv pinged me yesterday night by email asking:
if and when we get browsers with native HTML overlay support, how do you prevent the backwards-compatibility JavaScript executing and thereby including two copies of the overlay contents?
Excellent question captain, thanks for asking. So I spent a few cycles on the problem yesterday. It's not an easy problem at all. The solution must be declarative, scriptless, simple, non-intrusive and of course degrade nicely in legacy browsers.
So I came up with this solution, posted on Gerv's blog (it's the 7th comment; unfortunately, Gerv's blog offers no permalink for comments). Update: found a better way in 11th comment on Gerv's blog.
Comments
Sounds interesting. I would be happy to know how other technologies that require native support handle these kind of things. Like graphic cards whose native support is different between cards, with frameworks like OpenGL trying to provide functionality while still allowing for discovery of the internal capabilities of the underlying hardware (at least that's what I understood, maybe I am wrong).
I guess there is a 'pattern' out there that could be applied to different industries, including the web client one. Maybe some experience could be taken from the people who used similar solutions in the different areas?
We have several books/catalogs of pattern books, and these solutions ought to be documented outside their original contexts and published somewhere.
If you're making the link tag operate like the object tag, why not just use the object tag? Is it because in legacy browsers like IE 6 it doesn't work?