IE5 features vs. non ( was : RE: [thesite] comments on test.evolt.org)

[mccreath]

> > i'm fine with that.
> >
> > support on other platforms is not necessary because this bit of
> code only
> > gets sent out if the user is running win/ie5+.
>
> no way. we've *never* had features that are platform specific.. either
> we get it to work across everything, or we dont use it IMO. once we
> start going down the road of 'just one feature for IE' only, it will
> only turn into one more feature. then another and another untill the
> site in IE is different than anything else.

Just looking for some middle ground here.

If I understand Jeff's implementation of this correctly, it's using
JavaScript and CSS according to spec. It's not IE5-only in the sense that
it's a Microsoft tool that's been put in place, it's just that IE5 is the
only browser that's correctly interpreting correclty written JavaScript and
CSS. Do I understand that correctly?

If so, I don't have a problem putting on there, in principal. As Elfur
pointed out, our colors and fonts don't show up for certain browers either.
We hit as many as we could, but in trying to look forward, we decided that
some folks wouldn't get the same site visually that others get.

As to the usefulness of it, I dunno. I think it's *cool*, but ...

I see it being useful in a couple of ways:

If it could remember that I collapsed comments, then great. As it stood when
I tried it last, all the comments that I had collapsed opened up again when
I minimized the sidebar. bummer, but hardly the end of the world.

I think Matt was onto something that actually could become a feature of the
site, rather than a doo-hickey, and it could conceivably help people like
aardvark who uses a new browser on an old machine with a slow connection.

If we let people set a preference for the default state of the comments
(collapsed versus non-collapsed), it could actually lower download times for
some of the longer conversations. It would require some extra programming,
for sure, but does that seem like a reasonable use for it?

David