Andrew Gregory

Posts tagged with "sniffing"

A CMS to avoid?

Sunday, 28. September 2008, 09:34:30

I just had to write about this CMS I just bumped into: Zimplit. It seems to be very, very new. It also has probably the easiest install of any CMS - just copy two files onto your web server.

The reason it's that easy is simple - most of the complexity is handled via off-site JavaScript. The single PHP file is simply the conduit to access your web site files.

Zimplit needs no database - it creates standard HTML pages. Templating consists of you creating your own HTML file. New pages start off as copies of existing pages. It is really very basic. No blog support, no gallery support.

None of that is what prompted me to write this post, though. No, the reason is that I'm sad. It's the Javascript code that's making me sad. You see, Opera is blocked from the WYSIWYG editing features - only IE and Firefox are supported. And I mean Firefox. Seamonkey and any other non-Firefox Gecko browser is also blocked. So is any Webkit-based browser like Safari and Chrome. BTW, an "IE" browser is any browser that claims support for "document.all".

Yep, it's crappy browser sniffing time again.

Anyone who promotes the idea of feature detection instead of browser sniffing would be running around in little circles screaming and pulling their hair out right about now.

There are at least two WYSIWYG editors around that are much better - TinyMCE and FCKeditor. Why the Zimplit guys felt they had to reinvent the wheel and then make such a hash of it I don't know.

Apart from all that, what kills Zimplit for me is the dependency on the off-site JS and images. An international communications glitch would leave me unable to edit my site. Or the company could disappear.

Zimplit has too much going wrong now, and potentially far too much going wrong in the future. One to avoid, I think.

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Head-smacking sniffing stupidity

Tuesday, 20. June 2006, 08:18:01

opera, browsers, sniffing, javascript

I'm feeling a bit like Hallvord right now

While doing some web site troubleshooting, I bumped into the following code at Olive Software:

var Mac  =  (navigator.userAgent.indexOf("mac")!=-1)  || (navigator.userAgent.indexOf("Mac")!=-1);
var opnew = (navigator.userAgent.indexOf('Opera 7')!=-1);
var opold = (navigator.userAgent.indexOf('Opera')!=-1);
var msie  =  (navigator.userAgent.indexOf('MSIE')!=-1);
var moz  =  (navigator.userAgent.indexOf('Gecko')!=-1);
var NS6  =  (navigator.userAgent.indexOf('Netscape')!=-1 && navigator.userAgent.indexOf('Gecko')!=-1);
var Nav4  = (document.layers);
var konq = (navigator.userAgent.indexOf('Konqueror')!=-1);
if (opold && msie || opold){var opold=1; msie=0;}
if (msie && !opold){msie=1;}
if(opnew && opold){opold=0;}
if(msie || moz || opnew){var dom = 1;}

Whoever coded that was obviously having a really bad day. Maybe their cat had died, but it must have been something seriously distracting.

I mean, translate their "opnew" into English: "It's a new version of the Opera browser if it's version 7 and identifying itself as IE or Mozilla". That's right, any later versions (like 8 or 9) are old versions, and even version 7 identifying as itself is old!

And people wonder why Opera appears to have a hard time handling web sites?

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