Turn IE6 into IE7 with a Little Javascript
October 9th, 2006Last year I discovered the IE7 Script which adds functionality to IE6 which is being added to IE7, such as more comprehensive DOM support and CSS corrections. It does a bit of magic by simply adding missing functions which are a part of the DOM standard which call the existing functionality of IE6 which happens to use a different name or technique to accomplish the same task.
What it allows you to do is start writing Javascript against the standard DOM interface for IE6 and IE7 transparently.
The very same technique can be used for any browser to add missing standards support. It allows you to include more browsers in your supported suite of browsers while writing the same code for each web browser. See more from Eric Meyer.
October 9th, 2006 at 7:52 pm
Reading this, it made me think of general encapsulation. On the server side we often encapsulate libraries and vendor APIs in a class that hides the internal implementation and provides a more generic, application centric API to program against. It helps hide complexity and allows you to change implementation without as much of an impact on the client code.
I'm glad to see some of this engineering rigor is moving to the client side of web development as well. An Adapter pattern for JavaScript implementations.
October 10th, 2006 at 10:53 pm
Or perhaps the Facade Pattern.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facade_pattern
That is one I use fairly often. What do you call the pattern where the programmer looks at YouTube.com while the project compiles? I want to do that more often.