On Monday, June 28, 2004, at 10:51 AM, Martin Holmes wrote:
For the last year or two, it's been very practical do to this. The output from the current generation of our Hot Potatoes authoring tools is standards-compliant XHTML 1.1, CSS and JavaScript, and these highly complex and interactive pages work on IE6, Mozilla/Firefox, Opera 7.5+ and Safari. The ONLY browser-sniffing code we use these days concerns areas where the standards are not clear (such as how to calculate the size of the browser window viewport or document area), and this is abstracted into a couple of common JavaScript functions. In previous versions of our software, up to one third of the code in the pages was concerned with browser-sniffing and branching to handle relatively simple functionality such as drag-and-drop. We no longer need to waste all that work.
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martin,
this is very interesting to me, in general and in terms of work i'm doing right now. i admit i've always been surprised to hear developers (i'm really a designer) complain so much about cross-platform coding, especially as it appears to have gotten easier, recently. i wonder if you have one or two examples of hot potatoes in action that we might be able to take a look at?
j