On 21/11/12 18:33, James Forrester wrote:
On 20 November 2012 23:54, Martijn Hoekstra wrote:
I think a best of both worlds would be
preferable. I haven't seen the
stats, but I'd assume market share of IE 10 will be quite low. Still it
would be silly to not strive to support it.
Well, until this month IE 10 wasn't released (just a developer
version; I wasn't counting these). Thus the "current and
immediately-previous versions" for IE would have been 9 and 8.
Supporting browsers before they're released is a nice-to-have and, as
you say, sensible to get ahead of the work, but it's not as crucial as
fixing "live" versions for millions of people.
Funnily, Firefox 17 was released yesterday. So the latest Firefox is in
fact not shown in [[VisualEditor/2012-13_Q2_forward-look]] and I doubt
anyone on this thread had it installed when it started.
Which serves as a counterexample for the Brion statement of "nobody
should be running Chrome 22". Which was released two months ago.
I think that in addition to the some rule for the rapid release
versions, like "plus all its versions released in the last year" would
be needed.
Does it seem too much? Well, a year ago we were at Firefox 9. But
Firefox 10 is itself an Extended Support Release.
Does this mean much more work? It depends. For common browsers, we could
develop for the "new" and "old" versions. If it works for both, it is
likely to work in all the releases inbetween, too.
If the feature only works for some version (eg. suppose ContentEditable
had been added on FF 12 [if was in fact FF 3]), it could be documented,
and the feature supported just from that one onwards.
We must support old browsers, to the point where a browser designed in
the HTML4 days should provide an _acceptable_ experience. Yes, you
wouldn't have fancy HTML5 video or . But that shouldn't mean that you
couldn't rollback a certain vandalism with malformed wiktext because it
completely broke your editor.
We should have such a great-vision goal in mind. Then for «hard»
features such as Visual Editor, we may need to be satisfied with much
less, of course.
The bad thing I see with saying "volunteers can add VE support for
$SMALLBROWSER if they wish" is that only a few will be able to
understand the code, much less to fix it.