Heya!
What kind of effort would it be, you think, to make smolfedi compatible with even older browsers? From the top of my head, some of the things that would need to change would be
- Cookies: IBM WebExplorer/2 (for example) doesn't support that at all, I think
- Solution: persistent session variables in the URL
- CSS: The effective CSS support in the really old ones ranges from not-at-all to hideously limited
- Solution: Use only old-fashioned HTML tags and properties
- Images: "Modern" formats (PNG and even some JPG) isn't supported
- Solution: Server-side conversion of images to a specific format (GIF, JPG), size and color depth
- Videos: ....
- Solution: Just .. don't. Or convert key frames to GIF animations :-D
- Character sets: Old browser panic at the sight of multibyte characters..
- Solution: Convert everything to ASCII + HTML entities (as far as possible; I hacked together some scripts to do this a while back, and it kinda sorta works when used as a TCP proxy even!)
- Emoji/smileys: Similar to the character set problem
- Solution: Similar to the above: Convert the most common emoji to ascii-smileys (:) :P :> etc), the rest to small images?
I know this is a hideously tall ask. I also know my use of the word "solution" is extremely frivolous. But if any of this is even remotely interesting, I have a fair number of old browsers to throw at it, and I even used to code some PHP back in the late 90s, so who knows, maybe I can even help out a tiny bit? ;)
Heya!
What kind of effort would it be, you think, to make smolfedi compatible with even older browsers? From the top of my head, some of the things that would need to change would be
- Cookies: IBM WebExplorer/2 (for example) doesn't support that at all, I think
- Solution: persistent session variables in the URL
- CSS: The effective CSS support in the really old ones ranges from not-at-all to *hideously* limited
- Solution: Use only old-fashioned HTML tags and properties
- Images: "Modern" formats (PNG and even some JPG) isn't supported
- Solution: Server-side conversion of images to a specific format (GIF, JPG), size and color depth
- Videos: ....
- Solution: Just .. don't. Or convert key frames to GIF animations :-D
- Character sets: Old browser panic at the sight of multibyte characters..
- Solution: Convert everything to ASCII + HTML entities (as far as possible; I hacked together some scripts to do this a while back, and it kinda sorta works when used as a TCP proxy even!)
- Emoji/smileys: Similar to the character set problem
- Solution: Similar to the above: Convert the most common emoji to ascii-smileys (:) :P :> etc), the rest to small images?
I know this is a hideously tall ask. I also know my use of the word "solution" is extremely frivolous. But if any of this is even remotely interesting, I have a fair number of old browsers to throw at it, and I even used to code some PHP back in the late 90s, so who knows, maybe I can even help out a tiny bit? ;)