Comments on: A Note to Web Developers

By: Smokey

Smokey — Tue, 26 May 2009 19:58:58 +0000

Al Murillo: It’s good to hear that the sniffer is gone from your site. Hopefully one day that old Netscape script will be only a distant memory for the entire web! There are still lots of “broken” sites out there, but every fix helps, so thanks again for removing the sniffer from yours.

We’re still working on getting better and updated Mozilla documentation for authors, too, but there has been some progress since this originally came up in February.

By: Al Murillo

Al Murillo — Tue, 26 May 2009 19:35:04 +0000

Not that I care what you guys think about my site, but I have removed the sniffer just because it was not really doing much. It is good that you guys are bringing this up though. Keep up the good work.

By: David Boswell

David Boswell — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 05:06:05 +0000

Smokey, good point about coordinating with Mozilla Japan about archived content. I’ll look into that.

By: Smokey

Smokey — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 20:59:21 +0000

David: For the moment, that’s still the best page to redirect anyone looking for the sniffer to; it’s just not the optimal solution in the long term.

The other sniffer I mentioned earlier is bug 471835; I was hoping dbaron or someone else who could be deemed “responsible” for those pages would have commented. Note that page also exists on the Mozilla Japan website; is someone there tracking the archiving work that you, Sam Sidler, and others are doing on mozilla.org?

Gérard Talbot: The Ultimate JavaScript Client Sniffer pages were archived in August 2008; David just changed the 404-with-clickthrough-to-archive to a redirect to MDC’s slightly better (more correct) documentation.

By: Gérard Talbot

Gérard Talbot — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 20:10:38 +0000

(at) David Boswell,

This is word for word, byte for byte what I emailed you (and 2 other mozilla.org people) on August 3rd 2008:

”
The Ultimate JavaScript Client Sniffer, Version 3.03:
Determining Browser Vendor, Version, and Operating System With JavaScript http://www.mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/sniffer/browser_type.html should be deleted, removed, terminated and not necessarly archived. My opinion, my preference.
”

Regards, Gérard

By: David Boswell

David Boswell — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 18:21:06 +0000

Smokey, thanks for clarifying why you hadn’t linked to that page in your post. I guess I missed that point when I redirected the page

I’m happy to re-redirect that to wherever makes the most sense, but I’m not really in a position to judge where the best documentation is. My web developer skills are firmly frozen in the late 1990s. I’m also happy to help clean up any old http://www.mozilla.org issues. I’ll take a look and see if I can find the bugs you mentioned above.

By: Smokey

Smokey — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 02:42:35 +0000

Felix Pleșoianu: The sniffer is in http://www.teachercreatedmaterials.com/include/js/menu.js; I’m not sure that the JavaScript is actually doing anything, either (besides showing the annoying “your browser is not one of these five” alert on every pageload ).

By: Smokey

Smokey — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 00:30:28 +0000

Gérard Talbot: There’s no policy, unannounced or otherwise, to prevent comments with links (see for example the post from David Boswell). However, Akismet decided that your prior posts were unequivocally spam rather than flagging them for my review as questionable. As I’ve noted earlier, I did post a link to page that explained the proper methods for constructing cross-browser web pages, although it doesn’t itself have lots of copy-and-paste examples. I specifically did not link to the existing Mozilla Developer Center article because of the problems with it that you and I have both identified.

By: Felix Pleșoianu

Felix Pleșoianu — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 10:49:59 +0000

I surf with Javascript disabled by default. Surprise surprise, teachercreatedmaterials.com appears to work fine without any kind of scripting. Then again, I only did the most superficial of checks. Where’s their browser detection script anyway?

By: Gérard Talbot

Gérard Talbot — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 01:13:46 +0000

[I am reposting this for the 3rd time on your blog. Obviously, it is not possible to reply in your blog without first removing all the links. An unannounced policy and a very counter-productive one.]

Mr Ardisson,

What you did not write is URLs to recommended and recommendable practices
for writing cross-browser webpages. Here’s a few:

1-
Developing Cross Browser/Cross Platform Pages: Using Object/Feature
support detection approach: best and overall most reliable
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/Using_Web_Standards_in_your_Web_Pages/Developing_Cross_Browser%2f%2fCross_Platform_Pages#Using_Object.2fFeature_support_detection_approach.3a_best_and_overall_most_reliable

2-
A Strategy That Works: Object/Feature Detecting from comp.lang.javascript
newsgroup FAQ notes
http://jibbering.com/faq/faq_notes/not_browser_detect.html#bdFD

3-
Browser detection – No; Object detection – Yes by Peter-Paul Koch
http://quirksmode.org/js/support.html

4-
Javascript Best Practices: Feature-Detect Rather Than Browser-Detect by Matt Kruse
http://javascripttoolbox.com/bestpractices/#detect

5-
Browser detection by Garrett Smith
http://dhtmlkitchen.com/?category=/Browsers/&date=2007/11/24/&entry=Browser-Detection

People should not be explained how or why the previous methods were wrong, inappropriate, difficult to manage, unreliable not as much as being explained what to do, what is best to do, most recommendable, how to write good and reliable cross-browser code with examples, preferably real examples coming from real websites, preferably with interactive examples
which they can try, examine and use (and even eventually copy+paste).

regards, Gérard Talbot