On Monday, June 28, 2004, at 08:16 AM, Peter Baker wrote:
I suspect that my own experiences have made me a bit jaundiced about client-side programming generally. I spent years making and maintaining a Java applet that would work both in Netscape and IE. It was an unspeakable misery: every time I got it stable Sun would change the spec in response to some new security concern, or Microsoft would break some new thing in their Java "implementation," and I'd have to figure out what was wrong and fix it, often while my students or someone else's were complaining loudly about lack of access.
java is a particularly egregious example of incompatible implementations of what was meant to be an entirely platform-independent "standard". very very frustrating, in principle and in practice. "java" never really meant "java".
So now I'm in the process of migrating as much as possible to the server side, and my new rules are:
- never to do anything on the client side that can be done on the
server.
i don't think i would disagree with this. i would only say that the key word is "can". it includes the server resources to handle the load, and in such a way that it doesn't affect end-user experience (ie, slow loading or server overload errors). to be honest, my argument about a smaller niche audience with respect to browsers may apply here, as long as your institution has the server resources and bandwidth to give you.
- Use only standards-compliant features of browsers (in my case CSS
and a bit of [mostly] ECMA-compliant JavaScript).
exactly. and so this is *still* an argument for staying with standards and not relying on browser-dependent work-arounds.
cheers, j