ASP.NET Up Level Browsers and Web 2.0
October 9th, 2006What is an "up level" browser now anyway? When ASP.NET was first unleashed it was done at the time when Netscape and Internet Explorer were fiercely competing by adding features at every turn. To cope with the changes, ASP.NET included the browser capabilities database and generally labeled browsers as "up level" or "down level". This generally took into account whether the browser supported Cookies, Javascript and CSS. It was largely applied in Microsoft web products like Outlook Web Access and Sharepoint which do not attempt to work well in "down level" browsers. Years later this distinction still remains in ASP.NET, but you would be challenged to identify a modern browser which is not considered an "up level" browser by those standards.
We are now in a sort of generational shift from "up level" to Web 2.0 where browsers are assumed and required to have baseline support for Cookies, Javascript and CSS and now rich AJAX functionality. So it seems there is now another generalized classification available to ASP.NET.
- downlevel
- uplevel
- web2.0
Going forward you may be tempted to only support Web 2.0 capable browsers, and you may get your wish. It is also getting harder to identify a current browser release which does not have the basic support necessary for AJAX. The question left is, how do you handle those old "up level" browsers?
