Wanna know how I can tell that no other browser vendor participated in the creation of the new meta X-UA-Compatibletag? Because it's completely worthless - and in fact harmful - for any browser to implement!

I love this example from the overview article, including Firefox 3 as an example:

What seems to have slipped past the Microsoft Task Force of WaSP (or maybe it didn't and they're just playing coy) is that by implementing this specific feature in any other browser immediately either: A) Reduces its market size of viable web pages that will upgrade to new versions of the browser or B) Forces new versions of the browser to bloat, including backwards support for old-style rendering.

The fundamental issue is that Safari, Firefox, and Opera will all be harmed by attempting to implement this. Anne, from Opera, completely agrees.So, with that in mind, why even the attempt at making this sound like a "generally beneficial standardization issue"? Why go through the song-and-dance? Because if it was called:

then developers would surely, excuse me, shit the bed in frustration over being forced to add markup just to make their web applications render in a standards compliant manner. The commentson the article definitely indicate some level of this occurring already. However, the pretense of cooperation and generally applicability needs to be dropped. It doesn't exist, it's a complete lie, and any indication of general use is a sham. Call it for what it is: A shiv for jamming standards support into future versions of Internet Explorer.

JavaScript and X-UA-Compatible

With that rant out of the way, how will this new meta tag addition effect JavaScript and DOM support in future versions of Internet Explorer? That's the weird part - no one completely knows. Let's look at some randomly-picked issues that are sure to cause a world of fun in the future.

Cross-document issues

Let's say you have a page that's in IE7 mode and an iframe pointing to a page that's in IE8 mode (or vice versa) - and now you communicate across the frames. Now let's assume, for fun, that IE8 also support JavaScript getters and setters.

What happens when you bleed functionality across frames? Or even if you were to try and access functionality that doesn't exist in your engine from another? Who knows! This is positively frightening both from an implementation and user perspective.

Another random item: What happens when you use importNodeacross iframes that have different DOM versions?

Robert O'Callahan, Mozilla developer, has two blogposts on the subject that are both quite good.

Script Versioning

Up until this point, if we wanted to pick a different version of JavaScript to use we would do something like the following:

This works well in browsers that support it. However, with this new meta tag addition, Internet Explorer is pegging JavaScript versions to versions of their rendering engine. This means that (theoretically) if you wanted JavaScript 1.5 support you'd have to, also, be content with bad CSS support. If you wanted to upgrade to a new version of the scripting engine you'd also have to upgrade your CSS and markup as well. This is completely throwing out any sort of versioning system that already exists for JavaScript and forces users to use this new, inferior, system instead. How completely frustrating.

What I also find interesting is that, previously, Chris Wilson was concerned about implementing multiple versions of a JavaScript engine in order to maintain backwards compatibility. What they're doing now is, effectively, forcing themselves to have multiple JavaScript engines. So either they're gearing up to support JavaScript 2 or they've just lost one of their major qualms with the upcoming specification.

Minor Versions and Security Fixes

A final point that doesn't seem to be accounted for, at all, is the inclusion (or exclusion) of minor browser versions (including things like security patches). Internet Explorer hot patches have been known to cause problems in the past with web page functionality and rendering. However, since there's no way to specify which patches you "like" in this new meta tag scheme you're forced to consume them all.

The end result will be one in which: A) You're either constantly dodging mistaken bullets from the Internet Explorer team as the push out new releases or B) They're not going to do as many, if any at all, updates to the browser out of fear of breaking backwards compatibility. Honestly, I assume that B is far more likely, therefore you can be excited about looking forward to future, static, bug-laden releases of IE in the years to come!

On a whole, I really wish that this process had been done more in the open than it was. I doubt that as many issues, that we're seeing now, would've arrived. I absolutely don't envy Internet Explorer's situation in the matter so, for the sake of the web, let's hope they come up with an acceptable solution.

Project Description
Just by adding this small JavaScript module to the end of your web pages, you get your form's submissions intercepted and, instead of sending request to the server in the usual way, they are done asynchronously and in an AJAX-style smooth way.

As long as it is a client-side library it will work with any server technology: ASP.NET, PHP, JSP, Classic ASP... and even with local HTM files.

I've included extensibility so that you can add easily your own progress indicators (several included) and show error messages the way you prefer (by default it shows an alert).

It's transparent to your server code and could be used to add AJAX capabilities to some applications without writting a single line of code.

Documentation is included.



Features summary

• No-code AJAXification of web apps
• Supports any server technology, including ASP.NET, JSP, PHP, ASP 3.0...
• In ASP.NET it supports all kinds of postbacks: direct and by code.
• Works in any modern browser that supports AJAX.
• Supports cross-posting of forms, that is, you can send the information to any web page in the same domain. If all your web pages have AJAXInterceptor included (for example, you include it in your master page or template) you can hace
• Respects your custom onsumit event handlers.
• Supports browser history so that your users can hit the previous button and get the last rendered page.
• Two versions of the module:
- AJAXInterceptor.js: full commented one. Useful for debugging purposes.
- AJAXINterceptor_r.js: reduced-size version. It downloads faster as it only is 2.6 kB in size. It's better to use this on production apps.
• Automatically show/hide custom progress indicators.
• Support for cancelling operations.
• Support for custom message displaying.
• Supports any form in your page

Obviously this is not substitute at all of full-fledged APIs like Microsoft's ASP.NET AJAX, PHPLiveX or AJAX.NET, but will let you add AJAX support to your apps in a few seconds and without writing any code. Just give it a try!

In the ZIP you will find teh module, a working sample with ASP.NET and a PDF with the help documentation.

This project is just for fun :-)

I will be very glad if you drop me a line in case you use AJAXInterceptor in any real-world application or if you enhance it with new features.

Visit my .NET blog (Spanish) at http://www.jasoft.organd my e-mail marketing blog (English) at http://www.theemailingexperience.com

Highslide JS is an open source JavaScript software, offering a Web 2.0 approach to popup windows. It streamlines the use of thumbnail images and HTML popups on web pages. The library offers these features and advantages:

• No plugins like Flash or Java required.
• Popup blockers are no problem. The content expands within the active browser window.
• Single click. After opening the image or HTML popup, the user can scroll further down or leave the page without closing it.
• Compatibility and safe fallback. If the user has disabled JavaScript or is using an old browser, the browser redirects directly to the image itself or to a fallback HTML page.