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Comment by revjx | Hacker News Reader

This seems to force quirks mode in IE9, which prevents the pixel clock from displaying. Perhaps the missing DOCTYPE.

Lots of things like this don't seem to have even been tested in IE9, despite the fact it's (subjectively, to me at least) a decent browser that finally supports Canvas.

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There's a good chance that someone having fun with canvas does not run a system which supports any version of IE... which might explain the lack of testing.

A missing doctype shouldn't have anything to do with the system, though, assuming that's what the problem is. Clearly other browsers are more forgiving.

I didn't mean it from the code standard perspective. In a live product, invalid html is bad regardless of a system and it should be tested in all browsers.

But for one-off interesting thing, you'll probably check it in browser(s) you have installed only, or maybe even only your favourite one... and it's unlikely that IE will be that browser. Just a reflection on the setup of an average webdev interested in canvas.

Not having a doctype does indeed cause IE to go into quirks mode. This is still true even in IE9. Thankfully, <!DOCTYPE html> is recognized correctly, even by IE6.

I don't test "personal" code on IE9. I couldn't if I wanted to: the only Windows license I have is for XP which I have running on my main desktop. At some point I might upgrade to 7 (unless before then I decide to live without games and switch to Linux on the desktop instead of moving to another Windows version) but that won't be until I next rebuild that machine. All my other computing resources run Linux in some form or another.

Perhaps the author of this code is in a similar position, and has no Windows Vista/7 installs to test via IE9 with? It doesn't matter how decent IE9 is, if it won't run on your current platforms.

Testing on Chrome, Firefox and Opera is more universally easy as their latest desktop releases will run on Linux, OSX and XP+.

If a missing or malformed DOCTYPE is an issue then that is not IE9's fault, but you can't criticise the author for not explicitly testing on IE9 if he/she can't do so.

If you read my post again, you'll see I said "lots of things like this" haven't been tested in IE9. It wasn't a personal attack on the author. Just a remark that it's unfortunate that despite the canvas support in IE9, a large amount of these sorts of things that get linked from HN don't work in the browser.

The reasons behind that I'm sure are numerous and valid for a lot of people, but they don't make it any less annoying for me as a regular IE9 user.

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