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what the voices in my head tell me to write

Thursday, April 28, 2005

finally got rid of NN4 support on ingentaconnect 

Got out my chainsaw....

Leigh and the producers had said ages ago that I could get rid of NN4 support for 'connect. When I first started one of my first jobs was to try and get some level of usability for really old legacy users. I had done my best but basically there was not a lot that could be done.

I had brushed the whole thing under the carpet for a long time prefering to ignore it and hope it went away. Then about 6 weeks ago I decided to take a peek at in in NN4. It was completely unusable in every respect. I asked the helldesk if they had been getting any complaints and they said the haven't had a single one.

I didn't even look at the logs. I just said to Leigh and the producers that the site is unusable in NN4 and if there are no complaints then if anyone still has the POC installed then they know enough to have something better to hand as well.

To support NN4 every other browser in the world had do read one stylesheet and then import another one to override the NN4 styles. Of course this was a big overhead on the browser as it had twice as many style rules to work out complete with !important modifiers everywhere.

I also split up the huge monolithic main stylesheet(s) that have been in place since the earliest wireframes into half a dozen more focused ones. This will make it easier to resuse them for customised versions of the site and the like.

It sure felt good to see the site in all its glory like this. And its actually better in NN4 now basicallyt it doesnt have to deal with loads of styles it cant understand properly.

Permanent link and Comments posted by Rob Cornelius @ Thursday, April 28, 2005

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