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Comment by forgotmypw17 | Hacker News Reader

I find it interesting, but I'm biased against frameworks because I've yet to see one which claims to support every JS browser, which is one of my objectives.

For example, Opera 12 (Presto) has full modern DOM support with .createElement and such, but I doubt your framework would work with it?

There are hundreds of browsers and engines out there, and I want to support them all. Would your framework degrade gracefully in a browser you've never tested before?

Also, how do you deal no-JS users? I read through the documentation, but could not seem to find one?

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Supporting hundreds of different browsers?

This is a noble and audacious goal, but I suspect that it would either take enormous resources, or the least common denominator approach.

OTOH supporting, say, the 3 major browser engines that serve > 99% of the audience is sort of achievable, and also practical.

a) I believe your 99% figure is way off.

b) I believe the remaining 1% matters, perhaps more than the others. (See wheelchair analogy.)

c) Yes, it does take a least common denominator approach at first, but you can build a lot on top of that, carefully, without upsetting even such classics as Netscape, Mosaic, and IE4.

Would you say that one developer working part time for a couple of years is "enormous resource"?

You are going to have a hard time running JS Custom Elements or even the DOM on Mosaic!

IE4 had an early DOM but it was different from the current one, and JS syntax was different too.

Writing DOM-modifying code that does useful things on IE4 as well as on current browsers is possible, but requires a lot of extra code and testing for little gain, and will encounter browser bugs if you do anything complicated, so you can't just drop in a thoroughly-portable framework, you need to test as well.

If what you mean is you'd like graceful fallback to a decent non-JS page on ancient browsers, that's doable, but then it doesn't matter if the JS framework only supports 99% of browsers. Just make sure to disable the framework on browsers too old to use it. (You'll still have a hard time with CSS on Mosaic.)

RE "browser support". Synergy has support for "modern" browsers (e.g., https://caniuse.com/mdn-javascript_builtins_proxy_proxy). It would certainly be feasible to provide a legacy version to provide support for some older browsers. Thanks for asking the question though, I should call out "browser support" in the docs as well as the github page.

Thanks for your questions. RE "no-JS", I have prioritised support for prerendering so that synergy can be used for progressive enhancement. Its early days so the docs are very minimal at the moment, but I will certainly be adding much more detail around this and I'm really happy to hear somebody raising this question as it's a valid concern that often get overlooked.

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