Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Web browser "compatibility"

Is this an article dealing with Oracle Application Express? Barely.

I recently read the latest treatise from Joel Spolsky of "Joel on Software" fame. Joel does an excellent job of explaining the history of the Web "standards" which have gotten everyone into a little bit of a mess. And even though standards have been developed for HTML and Web browsers, it's always a challenge to maintain backward compatibility.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/03/17.html

When I read this, I couldn't help but think of poor Carl on our team who wrestles with these same challenges for every release of Oracle Application Express. It's hard enough to produce a Web application development environment which enables you to build applications to work elegantly with Firefox and Internet Explorer. This is why you don't see certification for Opera, Netscape Navigator, Safari and the like. They're all a little bit different.

I'm still waiting for the Oracle Application Express theme which supports Lynx.

1 comment:

Byte64 said...

Hello Joel!
If you had a change to take a look at my posting about the shuttle item, you will be surprised (or not) to find that my font sizing problem was showing on Firefox only, whereas all major browsers were correctly handling it. Unfortunately i was using FF to develop the page, so for quite some time i was hitting my head against a wall, before having the brilliant idea to try out some other browser and find that everyone else was doing fine... :-D

Bye,
Flavio!