Lesson Learned.
[ Posted by Dan on June 26, 2003 | 3 Comments ]

At work we have an internal-only web application that helps us (and by us, I mean the 120 person organization I work within, not the entire corporate entity) manage are our assets, hosts, and other operations oriented information. It's our lynch pin web app actually, and now, due to the one point oh release, it is my task to make sure it's compatible with Safari.

This is how yesterday's discussion about the getYear() method started. We are using that call in one script to deal with population of date fields (everything is tracked, and everything gets a time stamp). This effort is a classic example of why JavaScript, new browsers, and NOT following standards can cause extra work down the line.

Our server logs tell us that about 20 percent (I don't remember the exact amount, but it's much larger than "non trivial") of our users are Safari users, so this compatibility effort is essential. The saving grace is that the date functions we/I have written, are all in one place and sufficiently abstracted, and that helps me do less work. I had to add two lines of code to fix stuff. The hard part was doing the forensic work via alert() calls.

If I was smarter (and didn't use deprecated date methods), I wouldn't have had to make any edits, and Safari would have been auto-supported. Lesson learned.

Many thanks to those who posted yesterday.

 

		Not to detract from the lesson you learned, but if an internal app doesn't work with a particular browser, you can just tell people not to use it. My current app is internal and uses the nifty HTML editor that's built into Windows IE, so we just tell everyone to use IE6 on Windows. If you don't have a PC (some people have only macs), call IT and they'll get you one. Still cheaper than having developers spend all day QA'ing. -Posted by Eric on June 26, 2003 12:04 PM

		If I thought I could get away with that, I would, but this netowork is the most heterogeneous network I have ever seen (Mac, Solaris, Windows (nt, xp, 2k), Linux) and we can't set the suggested rule. -Posted by Dan on June 26, 2003 01:00 PM

		Seriously, you force me to use Internet Exploiter, and I can't be held responsible... -Posted by on July 14, 2003 10:17 PM

Comment posting has been turned off because I don't have enough time and will to deal with the constant comment spamming. I'm very sorry and will fix this sometime soon (soon = before 2004 ends).