Monday March 20

Spoiled

After a long hiatus, I'm diving head first back into DHTML/Ajax development. Am I insane?

This is going to hurt. I've been seriously spoiled for 6 years, working primarily with the pristine DOM of Mozilla/Firefox and the even more lovely Boxely. I had access to the source of both and could implement new features at the C++ level whenever I needed them. Now I am back to the world of unseemly JavaScript hackery.

6 years ago I had every quirk of every browser etched on my brain. Mozilla was still just a dream, IE5 was my love, and Netscape 4 was my bitch. Now today Mozilla is a dream come true, Netscape is dead, Safari and Opera are in the mix, and IE6 is about to become my bitch.

My previous post is evidence of how effectively I have purged my brain of all the miserable incompatibilities of the cross-browser world. I just assumed that IE supported XPath, since I had read about the 'selectNodes' function. Silly me, that only works on XML documents! Come back to me in a few months and I'm sure I'll be able to recite every insipid workaround ever dreamed up for Microsoft's sad little orphan. My poor little brain.