Do Try This at Home: Ajax Bookmarking, Cross-Site Scripting and Other Web 2.0 Browser Hacks

Presentation now available on SlideShare.

With the advent of Safari 3, Firefox 3, Opera 9.5, and Internet Explorer 7, modern browsers continue to evolve. In many ways, their JavaScript and DOM implementations have converged. But it’s their minute differences that continue to challenge the developers of complex Ajax applications. Ajax frameworks such as Prototype and Google Web Toolkit can pave over many bugs, quirks, and divergent interpretations of spec. But sometimes, developers are still forced to confront basic browser differences if they want to support a wide array of user-agents.

This session will provide practical, step-by-step advice about how to dig deep into the quirks of the major A-grade browsers and find a way to make code work in all of them. As a case study, we’ll look at the problem of Ajax history management, in which applications attempt to accommodate user expectations about the back button in single-screen, desktop-style Ajax applications. We’ll review the approaches taken by major webapps, such as Gmail, and popular frameworks, such as the Dojo Toolkit and the Yahoo! Interface Library. But the major focus will be on Really Simple History, an open source library that uses a variety of tricks and outright hacks to support Ajax bookmarking across the board. With so many JavaScript authors relying on frameworks to avoid the complexities of cross-browser support, it’s important to remember how to dig into the guts of new browsers as they’re released and figure out where their quirks need to be detected and corrected. Feature detection works 99% of the time, but for that other 1%, trial and error can show us the way.

Brian’s presentation is on 04/25/2008 at 3:50 – 4:40 PM.

Check out Brian’s presentation “Do Try This at Home”. It is now available on SlideShare.