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Writing cross-browser "desktop" html/javascript is very painful right now. The mobile world is a beautiful playground because IE isn't a serious player. Now if

• jcromartie 16y ago
  It's "very painful?" I can't imagine how you'd describe cross-browser HTML/JS in 2004.
  • dstein 16y ago
    Try 1998, when DOM didn't exist. That was pain.
    • metageek 16y ago
      Layers. Layers seemed easier than DOM...until you encountered the bug in Netscape 4 where you couldn't have two layers loading at the same time. I worked on Netcaster for a while, and we had to have a queue of (layer,url) pairs; when each layer was finished loading, its onLoad handler would notify the queue to load the next layer.
  • eddanger 16y ago
    What kind of html/js apps were you making in 2004!?
    • stan_rogers 16y ago
      Well, I was making an online charity auction app for the United Way silly season with 10-second high bid updates for each of 20 - 30 items being auctioned each day. Average number of concurrent users was ~1000. The app supported IE 5+, NS 4.7 and 6, Phoenix/Firebird and Opera (each of our new acquisitions had its own pet house browser). Updates were through 1-pixel iframes/ilayers, and the whole thing ran on a single-processor P III 800Mhz Lotus Domino R5 server. And believe it or not, the problem child was Opera -- CSS backgrounds just would not colour inside the lines in the current version at the time.