musingsfrommars.org— The new Atlas Ajax Controls from Microsoft almost flunk out... Fail to support Opera and Safari, among others.
Apr 18, 2006View in Crawl 4
Well if I weren't a web developer I wouldn't be able to see the flaws in your logic. For a long time IE did their own thing in the DHTML world. They basically said "We're not going to follow the WC3 guidelines, they can follow us if they want". Well, a few years down the road now, they're busting their asses to make IE7 truly WC3 compliant.I don't doubt I spend about half my time coding for cross-browser issues. More often than not, there's code that says "If it's IE, do this. If it's ANY OTHER BROWSER, do that". So who's the odd man out? IE is. They're doing their own thing and it's screwing the entire industry.
@badriramfont tag? :-(Font tags are one of the largest bastardizations of HTML. They serve no purpose whatsoever except presentation, which should be taken care of with CSS.
Dude, if they just follow the standards they don't have to support different browsers differently. They just have to code once.Instead of hacking their existing code to work on different browsers too.I would just use one of the Open Source AJAX frameworks (DWR, AjaxTags, AjaxAnywhere, Zimbra, OpenLaszlo) which are cross browser anyways instead of waiting for MS to hack Atlas till it works.More AJAX frameworks by platform and language here: <a class="user" href="http://ajaxpatterns.org/AJAXFrameworks">http://ajaxpatterns.org/AJAXFrameworks</a>
Atlas is no more in beta than Windows XP is. Many of you seem to think that because Microsoft released Atlas and these controls with the language “early preview” that this translates to the software being “beta” or even “alpha,” as one of you has suggested. If any of you have ever been in a true beta test, or, earlier, alpha test, you’ll know that this is just language Microsoft is using to cover itself. The fact is, all of Microsoft’s releases have always been “beta” in that sense… there are always bugs that need to be fixed.But why pick on Microsoft? They’re not the only ones that play this game. Google has released oodles of software under the guise of being “beta” releases, but we all know that they aren’t, really. Apple released Boot Camp recently as a “Public Beta,” and like Google they at least made that clear on the product’s home page. (Microsoft’s Atlas home page gives you no hint that the product is beta in any sense of the word.) So stop trying to apologize for Microsoft’s “beta” product… they released controls that were not cross-browser or cross-platform in the sense that I defined them in my first article on this subject. All the other vendors have been graded the same way, and the grading system is clearly explained in the first article.It’s also important to distinguish between the release of a beta product for consumers and one for developers, which is what Atlas supposedly is. Despite its being “preview” software, Microsoft actively encourages its developers to begin building web applications with Atlas–now–which means that its “beta” software is in turn going to produce hundreds or thousands of “beta” web applications, which won’t work correctly on all platforms. If you’re building for a company Intranet and want to do this, it’s up to you. But many people use ASP and .NET to build public websites and web applications. Those are not going to work for every visitor, which is precisely what happened with an earlier breed of Microsoft development tools. Take a good read of the Atlas home page and honestly tell me if you see anything here that remotely suggests that Atlas isn’t production-ready.Second, the grade I’ve given Atlas does not reflect the total value of Atlas as a framework for doing web development. That’s not the issue here. The server-side technology, or development environment used, is not considered in the score. As the first article makes clear, this scorecard grades the toolkits solely on the basis of whether or not the client-side output they produce will adhere to a cross-browser, cross-platform ideal. I get the sense from some of your (rather nasty) remarks that you don’t really give a *%!+/*&! about whether you build a website that can be used by non-IE, non-Windows users or not. That, of course, is your right. I just hope your views don’t prevail as Web 2.0 gets built out, and that the next generation of web software will be as open and accessible to all as the web’s pioneers originally envisioned.Finally, to any Opera users who still think Musings from Mars doesn't render in Opera, try upgrading to Opera 9, which is miles ahead of not only Opera 8 but of Firefox and even Safari in many respects. It's not perfect, but then again I'm not a huge software company who's in this for the money. I don't have legions of testers helping me with QA.
"Listen man. Are you retarded or something?" Not that I know of."Don't you understand plain english."Uh, is that supposed to be a question? Maybe it's just my failure to interpret your perfect english."You just took my code and plugged it into google searching for Alpha"No, actually that's not what I did. Alpha is just another word for transparency. Unless that's just in my poor subset of english that you referred to above.I'm not saying that the way MS implemented that wasn't a hack, but what part of the W3C says that the iframe element shouldn't inherit from the user agent's default background color? An iframe isn't some div with overflow set to auto, it's an embedded browser frame."I posted in this forum because AJAX breaks standards."AJAX doesn't necessarily have to break any web standards. We have a JSP site that we developed where I work that uses AJAX and it's completely standards compliant, and it's 100% functional regardless of whether a users agent supports CSS or JavaScript or images. Atlas may not output standards-compliant code by default, but I'm sure that the code is pretty easy to extend so that it does output standards-compliant code. .Net 1.0/1.1/2.0 all work the same way."So, pleople using Linux or Mac OS"Is Firefox going somewhere?"Its just that when its a decision between paying the fines and keeping broken products on the shelves, keeping broken products works in MS'es favour as it helps to tie mindless nitwits like you tied in."Last time I checked IE was free. MS is a public business that has to worry about shareholders. It's simply a matter of money."Hope that clears up some stuff for you."Crystal.
alej744Apr 19, 2006
i dont know... I ... dont ....... KNOW...!!!
brilhastiApr 19, 2006
Well if I weren't a web developer I wouldn't be able to see the flaws in your logic. For a long time IE did their own thing in the DHTML world. They basically said "We're not going to follow the WC3 guidelines, they can follow us if they want". Well, a few years down the road now, they're busting their asses to make IE7 truly WC3 compliant.I don't doubt I spend about half my time coding for cross-browser issues. More often than not, there's code that says "If it's IE, do this. If it's ANY OTHER BROWSER, do that". So who's the odd man out? IE is. They're doing their own thing and it's screwing the entire industry.
brandizzleApr 19, 2006
Or...they support 2 out of the 4 tested. That's 1/2. That's a 50, an F.
dieseltravisApr 20, 2006
@badriramfont tag? :-(Font tags are one of the largest bastardizations of HTML. They serve no purpose whatsoever except presentation, which should be taken care of with CSS.
hchaudh1Apr 20, 2006
Dude, if they just follow the standards they don't have to support different browsers differently. They just have to code once.Instead of hacking their existing code to work on different browsers too.I would just use one of the Open Source AJAX frameworks (DWR, AjaxTags, AjaxAnywhere, Zimbra, OpenLaszlo) which are cross browser anyways instead of waiting for MS to hack Atlas till it works.More AJAX frameworks by platform and language here: <a class="user" href="http://ajaxpatterns.org/AJAXFrameworks">http://ajaxpatterns.org/AJAXFrameworks</a>
llscottsApr 21, 2006Submitter
Atlas is no more in beta than Windows XP is. Many of you seem to think that because Microsoft released Atlas and these controls with the language “early preview” that this translates to the software being “beta” or even “alpha,” as one of you has suggested. If any of you have ever been in a true beta test, or, earlier, alpha test, you’ll know that this is just language Microsoft is using to cover itself. The fact is, all of Microsoft’s releases have always been “beta” in that sense… there are always bugs that need to be fixed.But why pick on Microsoft? They’re not the only ones that play this game. Google has released oodles of software under the guise of being “beta” releases, but we all know that they aren’t, really. Apple released Boot Camp recently as a “Public Beta,” and like Google they at least made that clear on the product’s home page. (Microsoft’s Atlas home page gives you no hint that the product is beta in any sense of the word.) So stop trying to apologize for Microsoft’s “beta” product… they released controls that were not cross-browser or cross-platform in the sense that I defined them in my first article on this subject. All the other vendors have been graded the same way, and the grading system is clearly explained in the first article.It’s also important to distinguish between the release of a beta product for consumers and one for developers, which is what Atlas supposedly is. Despite its being “preview” software, Microsoft actively encourages its developers to begin building web applications with Atlas–now–which means that its “beta” software is in turn going to produce hundreds or thousands of “beta” web applications, which won’t work correctly on all platforms. If you’re building for a company Intranet and want to do this, it’s up to you. But many people use ASP and .NET to build public websites and web applications. Those are not going to work for every visitor, which is precisely what happened with an earlier breed of Microsoft development tools. Take a good read of the Atlas home page and honestly tell me if you see anything here that remotely suggests that Atlas isn’t production-ready.Second, the grade I’ve given Atlas does not reflect the total value of Atlas as a framework for doing web development. That’s not the issue here. The server-side technology, or development environment used, is not considered in the score. As the first article makes clear, this scorecard grades the toolkits solely on the basis of whether or not the client-side output they produce will adhere to a cross-browser, cross-platform ideal. I get the sense from some of your (rather nasty) remarks that you don’t really give a *%!+/*&! about whether you build a website that can be used by non-IE, non-Windows users or not. That, of course, is your right. I just hope your views don’t prevail as Web 2.0 gets built out, and that the next generation of web software will be as open and accessible to all as the web’s pioneers originally envisioned.Finally, to any Opera users who still think Musings from Mars doesn't render in Opera, try upgrading to Opera 9, which is miles ahead of not only Opera 8 but of Firefox and even Safari in many respects. It's not perfect, but then again I'm not a huge software company who's in this for the money. I don't have legions of testers helping me with QA.
jasqwertyApr 22, 2006
Wow, good job retard. Couldn't argue with my main point, THAT THEY'RE BIASED AS f**k, so you harp on a semantics issue. Piss off bitch.
dieseltravisMay 6, 2006
"Listen man. Are you retarded or something?" Not that I know of."Don't you understand plain english."Uh, is that supposed to be a question? Maybe it's just my failure to interpret your perfect english."You just took my code and plugged it into google searching for Alpha"No, actually that's not what I did. Alpha is just another word for transparency. Unless that's just in my poor subset of english that you referred to above.I'm not saying that the way MS implemented that wasn't a hack, but what part of the W3C says that the iframe element shouldn't inherit from the user agent's default background color? An iframe isn't some div with overflow set to auto, it's an embedded browser frame."I posted in this forum because AJAX breaks standards."AJAX doesn't necessarily have to break any web standards. We have a JSP site that we developed where I work that uses AJAX and it's completely standards compliant, and it's 100% functional regardless of whether a users agent supports CSS or JavaScript or images. Atlas may not output standards-compliant code by default, but I'm sure that the code is pretty easy to extend so that it does output standards-compliant code. .Net 1.0/1.1/2.0 all work the same way."So, pleople using Linux or Mac OS"Is Firefox going somewhere?"Its just that when its a decision between paying the fines and keeping broken products on the shelves, keeping broken products works in MS'es favour as it helps to tie mindless nitwits like you tied in."Last time I checked IE was free. MS is a public business that has to worry about shareholders. It's simply a matter of money."Hope that clears up some stuff for you."Crystal.
steward5732Jun 13, 2006
Initially, it will not cover all browser. as time goes, it will become better<a class="user" href="http://www.AtlasASP.com/">http://www.AtlasASP.com/</a>