And I really appologize again for loosing it. I understand why you may have been loosing it yourself. It is a hazard of the occupation we chose. The greatest job skill we have is a tollerance for fustration.
Where I would draw the line is that I just wouldn't make the existing flash server data calls rely on external interface. I don't anticipate it happening and if it does I can deal with that as long as folk know that there is a price to pay for it. Idealy there would be a switch to choose which to use.
The reason is that as long as laszlo can target the flash player without relying on _javascript_, I am confident that it is the best tool that exists for developing educational software.
As soon as you start mixing flash with _javascript_ all bets are off as you are aware.
I just meant it to be a side note, not a debate or a crusade.
I hope it is over now and that there are no hard feelings. There is a lot of good to focus on now and I will do so.
-Cort
I'm sorry Cortlandt, I didn't mean to make you angry by implying that you didn't care a lot about disadvantaged students in schools. I apologize for being so insensitive.
Besides the obvious _javascript_ deficiencies, I've experienced some bad hard crashing problems with MacIE when using LzSetCanvasAttribute, that I simply could not figure out any way to work around (and I tried very hard – I can send you a test case that will crash it every time, if you want to try to work around the problem yourself – it was due to some kind of race condition when loading a Flash player into a frame in order to send a message to the other Flash player running Laszlo).
It's wishful thinking to expect Laszlo to work reliably on MacIE like it does on a modern web browser (i.e. without crashing), and no amount of hacking HTML or _javascript_ or LZX code can do anything about that.
There are many bugs deeply baked into MacIE and its interaction with Flash that will never get fixed, and there's nothing that Laszlo Systems or anyone but Microsoft can do about it.
I think it's more realistic to face that MacIE is not well supported by OpenLaszlo or supported at all by any _javascript_ AJAX libraries, because of long standing MacIE bugs and consistent lack of support from Microsoft, than putting much effort into supporting MacIE with advanced software like OpenLaszlo or any of the _javascript_ AJAX libraries.
Of course the educational community is important, and it's too bad that there are lots of schools that have a hard time upgrading because of the reasons you give. But as you certainly know, it's a much bigger problem than fixing bugs in OpenLaszlo or Internet Explorer can solve.
Upgrading to Firefox is the least of the hurdles they have to jump, and trying to make Laszlo bend over backwards to support MacIE, just won't go very far to solving those many other fundamental problems that must be addressed first (like hooking up reliable network connections, or voting school boards who support Intelligent Design out of office).
Where would you draw the line in your desire to support for MacIE? Should the eventual DHTML version of OpenLaszlo try to support it? Why not also support 80x24 dumb text terminals?
I think the effort and resources are better spent moving OpenLaszlo forward, than trying to support buggy products whose manufacturers have declared obsolete and taken off the market.
-Don
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