The jQuery philosophy has made it much easier to deal with downlevel browsers for me. When I need compatibility, I build the page as I would if I weren't using javascript at all. Links all have hrefs to relevant places, elements that should be updated dynamically are filled with data on the server side, etc.
Once I'm to that point, I start making jQuery do the cool things. The browsers that can support it get setup within the .ready() event. As an example, one of the sites I work on has a number of "journals" that need to be featured on the frontpage. The new version will have a little tabbed control that updates a headline list. The tabs themselves are completely functional without javascript, they simply have hrefs to each individual journal. With jQuery enabled, my super special function grabs that href, alters it to get a json result, then uses that to reload the headlines. The advantage to this approach is: you end up with semantically appropriate HTML, and the dynamic functionality is decoupled from the page markup. You won't find <a href="#"> anywhere. :) So, in summary: build the downlevel functionality first, add the cool stuff on top of that. You'll get cleaner HTML, and it will degrade gracefully. -Kurt -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Mike Chabot Sent: Wednesday, October 18, 2006 11:53 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [jQuery] Handling unsupported browsers Does anyone have a preferred way for handling browsers that are not officially supported by jQuery, such as Netscape? What I am planning on doing is having server-side browser detection code which gives me the browser name, platform, and version number, then in my site, having each page coded in two different ways: one for Ajax and one without Ajax. Is this what other people do? Does anyone have a browser-compatibility chart, where I can see which parts of jQuery work in the various browsers? Thank you, Mike Chabot _______________________________________________ jQuery mailing list [email protected] http://jquery.com/discuss/ _______________________________________________ jQuery mailing list [email protected] http://jquery.com/discuss/
