After doing some research into cross domain scripting to allow injecting content from one domain to another I cam across two interesting articles. One was regarding the new XDomainRequest object now available in IE8 (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288060(VS.85).aspx) and the headers that FireFox has added(? you can add headers without consulting the w3c?) (http://ejohn.org/blog/cross-site-xmlhttprequest/).
Now this is all groovy and everyone is excited. The fireworks are going off, finally we have an answer to a nasty problem! People are singing in the street, hanging out windows smiling and dancing away.
Then comes along little old me. The profit of doom. The realist, the guy who makes the dreams and ideas of business a success or failure. The little monkey who sits behind his desk coding all the business ideas. While I agree it is exciting, I get a little nervous. These new feature sets are only supported by the new browsers, and I mean brand spanking new. Yes one day they will be old but right now they are new. Many people in 1st world countries update their software and hardware more regularly than they change their underwear. Out in the 3rd world countries like South Africa we still have people running Windows 98 with Internet Explorer 4, or Netscape Navigator. Yeah laugh it up and tell them to upgrade. No seriously though, I know business needs to make decisions and people need to keep up, the problem is the trouble you have to go through explaining the issues to business. Inevitably business will tell you to hack a fix together because 95% of their customer base is running Windows 3.11 and Internet Explorer 0.1a. To that I generally reply that the mechanisms for achieving what they want will have to be re-looked at.
The nastiest case is when business has already decided your platform and delivery mechanism. Then heads roll, tears flow and fingers bleed while trying to hack around new technology implementations. Anyways to cut a long story short I worked up this dialog.
[A white walled office with two executives enjoying a cup of coffee and a discussion on what to do next after researching facebook]
Business guy 1: "Ah cool! we can start consuming resources form other domains!!!!"
Business guy 2: "How do you know this?"
Business guy 1: "I read about it on facebook"
Business guy 2: "Ah ok, it must be true then"
Business guy 1: "Cool get the developers to start consuming the other sites"
[Business guy 2 runs to the project manager and gives him the great news. The project manager gets so excited he shaves weeks of the development time to try and get that bonus the business guys promised him should he start getting projects in before the scheduled deadline]
Project manager: "Right guys you got a week to over haul our faulty, rickety, bug prone website written in out dated languages and glued together by a number of applications on the server doing file replication and downloading using CSV files ever 24.34 minutes. The best part? you get to rebuild it using this glorious new technology! Right, now that everyone is excited, how long you think it is going to take?! “
Mike *in the background* : "2 - 3 days"
Project Manager: "great do it!"
Me: "ummm, what about older browsers? They won't be able to support this"
Big Boss: "I don't want problems, I want solutions. Now make it happen!"
Me: "Ok, maybe I didn’t make myself clear when I said '"’won’t be able to support this’, the older browsers DO NOT support this."
Big Boss: "all you ever say is can't can't can't!"
Kenneth: "… but ... "
Skulkinator: "why don't we just write our own browser that supports everything! That way we can take over the planet when we launch it and not have to worry about updates because the updates will be done via the website every time it renders a page, we will call it “Just In Time Page Renderer or (because we in South Africa and love acronyms so much) JInTiPaRe. So we control the web and no one else will use any web browsers because they can’t because we will rewrite the HTTP protocol to suit our specific needs!"
Big Boss: "Yes! Answers! I like that!" How long will that take?"
Mike: "2-3 days"
Big Boss: "Yes! You guys are legends! Do it!"
[ Gun shot rings out *BANG!* ]
Big Boss: "What was that?"
[Team runs off screaming like girls, while I lay in the corner with a big hole in my head]
Big Boss: "Clock is ticking guys! Get on it”
Devlin *mumbles* : “Any one got a spare bullet?”
I am pretty certain you get the point and as if HTML 5 wasn’t enough to worry about, now we got this puppy. This is just a dramatic reaction to something really unimportant and not a cry for help or anything like that, please relax. I am not going to do this at home or work, I listen to the WWE wrestlers.
Happy day to you and yours :)