5 ms·

I would disagree. IE5.5 was the first browser you could reliably write "rich" web UIs in. Once we got to IE6/ Netscape 6/ Phoenix, it felt too easy.

TimTheTinker 8y ago
> IE5.5 was the first browser you could reliably write "rich" web UIs in My point is that in the IE6 era (and previously), doing so was categorically hard -- I didn't say impossible. Also, that changed with FF 3.5, IE8, Chrome, etc. Admittedly, IE6 and FF 1.5 were the first browsers I had to develop apps for from scratch. (And FF was already far more robust.)
tracker1 8y ago
I wrote some pretty impressive applications with charting in NN4/IE4 days... it was horrible, and you couldn't pay me enough to do it again.
- wvenable 8y ago
  I think the desire to create this insane things using technology that wasn't ready for it is what drove browser development forward. But this is like complaining your toddler couldn't do algebra now that all your kids are teenagers.
- tclancy 8y ago
  Can I try? That sounds awful. Did you prefer `document.all` or `document.layers[]`?
  - tracker1 8y ago
    I actually wrote an abstraction layer that normalized it a bit. Not nearly as cleanly as the DOM API eventually did, but enough to get work done (for the most part). Still had to do things like have a white overlay set/unset on the screen for NN to avoid visual flickering, etc. document.all, the way IE worked had a few advantages... Layers in NN didn't allow you to break apart a form into child components you could hide/show was a particular issue. So you had to mirror values in/out of the child layer portions of the form. That was about the most common and painful problem between the two imho. Another was when IE 5.0.0 broke the older API for dealing with changing the children of a <select> node. Which was fixed in 5.0.1, but 5.0.0 was on every Office 2000 and Windows 2000 Disc, and what a LOT of people had. That was painful to deal with too.

TimTheTinker 8y ago

> IE5.5 was the first browser you could reliably write "rich" web UIs in My point is that in the IE6 era (and previously), doing so was categorically hard -- I didn't say impossible. Also, that changed with FF 3.5, IE8, Chrome, etc. Admittedly, IE6 and FF 1.5 were the first browsers I had to develop apps for from scratch. (And FF was already far more robust.)

tracker1 8y ago

I wrote some pretty impressive applications with charting in NN4/IE4 days... it was horrible, and you couldn't pay me enough to do it again.

wvenable 8y ago
I think the desire to create this insane things using technology that wasn't ready for it is what drove browser development forward. But this is like complaining your toddler couldn't do algebra now that all your kids are teenagers.
tclancy 8y ago
Can I try? That sounds awful. Did you prefer `document.all` or `document.layers[]`?
- tracker1 8y ago
  I actually wrote an abstraction layer that normalized it a bit. Not nearly as cleanly as the DOM API eventually did, but enough to get work done (for the most part). Still had to do things like have a white overlay set/unset on the screen for NN to avoid visual flickering, etc. document.all, the way IE worked had a few advantages... Layers in NN didn't allow you to break apart a form into child components you could hide/show was a particular issue. So you had to mirror values in/out of the child layer portions of the form. That was about the most common and painful problem between the two imho. Another was when IE 5.0.0 broke the older API for dealing with changing the children of a <select> node. Which was fixed in 5.0.1, but 5.0.0 was on every Office 2000 and Windows 2000 Disc, and what a LOT of people had. That was painful to deal with too.