Minor compatibility tables updated; spring cleaning

Rather to my surprise I started early on QuirksMode's spring cleaning. I removed about 50 pages that hadn't been updated since 2003 or 2004 and contained ancient and crappy scripts, or descriptions of old browser versions that nobody cares about today.

In addition I wrote a simple (but ponderous) script that finds out exactly which pages contain compatibility tables. I lost overview a few years ago, but this script reveals that there are currently 24 compatibility tables on my site. (There used to be 27, but I removed three.)

(BTW: this script is a bit slow, since it first loads the sitemap and then loads every single page the sitemap links to and sees if it contains a compatibility table. It will never win even a second prize in a beauty contest. Don't complain about it, please, you will be ignored.)

Once I had that data available I started working on the many minor compatibility tables. To date, I've reviewed and updated the following ones:

Viewport experiments

There's one thing I can't decide: should I keep the Viewport experiment pages, or are they so outdated they should be removed? I created these pages back in 2003, and although retesting everything seems like a good idea in theory, this area of JavaScript is so hideously complicated that frankly I don't feel like spending several hours for little return.

Comments

1 Posted by Peter Gasston on 26 February 2008 | Permalink

It would be nice if comments were allowed on the test pages, so that feedback could be provided.

For example, why test with Opera & Safari/Win betas, but not the FF3 beta?

On the [wbr] page, FF3 now supports [] so that is the optimal solution.

Sorry if that sounded like I was griping; thanks a million for the invaluable resource you provide.

2 Posted by Peter Gasston on 26 February 2008 | Permalink

That should be: FF3 now supports soft hyphens.

3 Posted by Plopi on 26 February 2008 | Permalink

I've learned a new balise today:
http://www.quirksmode.org/oddsandends/wbr.html

Usefull !!
Thanks

4 Posted by Ted Henry on 26 February 2008 | Permalink

We still care about the old browsers. I was just searching for some information about an old browser on Quirksmode the other day. I know the information used to be here but now it is gone :-(

5 Posted by BARTdG on 27 February 2008 | Permalink

Wow, thanks for mentioning the WBR page. Might come in handy.

Please, leave the viewport experiments for some more time. Like Ted says: it 's a great disappointment if someone looks for a resource and it 's gone.

6 Posted by Anton Nekipelov on 27 February 2008 | Permalink

Also, there is a reason in keeping old pages for educational purposes. To study the nature of browser incompatibilities it's good to start from studying history of browsers and browser bugs :) /nojk

7 Posted by Sander on 27 February 2008 | Permalink

I'd like to echo the requests to not throw out old pages. It'd be really appreciated if you could just slap a big "outdated, don't use for anything critical anymore" header on top of them and let them live on indefinitely in an archive section somewhere, saving me the trouble of having to painstakingly dig through the wayback machine to find that one page that I remember which said how Mozilla 1.7 used to compare on [whatever subject I'm looking into at that point].

8 Posted by Grant Hutchins on 27 February 2008 | Permalink

I just used the <wbr> reference today by coincidence, and subconsciously noticed that it felt cleaner and more straightforward. Good work!

9 Posted by Johan on 27 February 2008 | Permalink

I totally agree with #7.
Please keep the old pages.

10 Posted by Alex on 27 February 2008 | Permalink

Keep the viewport pages please. I still reference them when I'm pondering the behavior of browsers regarding CSS and other things. Actually an update for those pages would be awsome!

11 Posted by ppk on 28 February 2008 | Permalink

Due to popular demand I'll keep my Viewport pages for the moment. I won't update them any time soon, though.

Maybe I'll restore the browser pages, though why anyone needs them in this day and age is beyond my understanding. What sort of information are you looking for, and why?

As to the old scripts, they were crap that taught wrong coding techniques, and I'm glad to be rid of them.