Of broken promises and fixed websites

Over five years ago, I wrote a very simple web-based system. This system, however, did some basic client-side (Javascript, of course) validations before sending the data off to the server. And it worked nicely. On Linux, of course. The system went live. It worked correctly less than 1/10th of the time. Yes, somewhat strangely, quite close to the ratio of Netscape/MSIE users. Yes, a Javascript coding bug. The embarassment made me swear not to get close to Javascript ever, ever again. Of course, we live in a world where idle loops get optimized and where infinite loops have an ETA, this had to change at some point. Earlier this week, I decided to unfuck a web layout that worked (again) correctly in Mozilla and KHTML, but horribly in MSIE. I didn’t care before, because this layout was used on a production system at work, but its users were only two colleagues and myself - Only I’m about to put a public module up. I re-did the site layout and CSS (I cannot believe Dreamweaver code is that ugly!)… The only problem was, I now know, quite common: I needed equal height CSS-made columns. And although I had come to several pseudo-solutions, they all appeared pseudo-b0rked in one or more pseudo-browsers. The only way I found to get it working was to free myself from prejudices and go back to Javascript. BTW, the Javascript X library looks quite handy - but at over 50k, it’s not something I’m terribly happy about including in a website. What’s next? Am I going to fall for coding over-AJAXy sites? I hope to maintain at least partial sanity.

Comments

Anonymous 2006-11-17 11:06:36

Re: Of broken promises and fixed websites

You can definitely do equal-height columns without Javascript and without per-browser CSS hacks.

David Fu 2006-11-16 18:58:02

Re: Of broken promises and fixed websites

Hi Gunnar, Not so lucky with client-side JavaScript? Maybe you will have more luck with server-side JavaScript ;)