Konqueror's Javascript Continues To Improve

ElitusPrime writes "Konq's Javascript support may have been regarded as weak in the past, but 3.0 is a huge improvement. As an example, DHTML Lab has just released a Konqurer supported version of their popular HierMenus product. These cross-browser, backwards compatible pop-up menus are very complex, using all sorts of Javascript and DHTML tricks. Konq now supports them out of the box!"

Comments

Are these guys stoned?

[brunes69]

I went to that site in the latest Konq CVS, and the menus worked great. But then I went on to read about this company.. 29.95 for the use of some simple DHTML menus on only 5 pages?!@?!? Higher license fees for mroe pages??!?! I could code my own implimentation of this in 5-10 mins! These guys are seriously whacko.

Re:Are these guys stoned?

[befletch]

The Hiermenus are not "simple DHTML menus". They are extremely capable menus that work with an unprecedented set of browsers and capabilities, with good ease of use.

And if you want more than just capable menus, check out Tibet, a full client-server architecture for the web. These guys started by using JavaScript to fix the bugs in various browser JavaScript implementations, and then proceeded to build class libraries, debugging tools, client-side page templates, and a full IDE. All in JavaScript. And I'm not making an April Fools joke.

Also, the code is dual-licensed, commercial and open source.

The code is beta at the moment, and there is much work to do, but this is a seriously ambitious undertaking.

And no, I don't work for them or otherwise benefit from this heading-towards-off-topic post.

Not stoned

[Julian Morrison]

What are you paying for?

=> the programmer time you don't have to waste reimplementing the wheel

=> not having to face the horrible realization that you're losing customers because your reimplemented wheel only plays nice in IE version x.y, and breaks or looks ugly on anything else. And wedges the browser solid on IE version x.z

Re:Not stoned

[brunes69]

Er, DHTML menus are very simple to do. One small section of code will make a DHTML menu that will work in any version of IE since 4.0, and any version of Mozilla / Gecko based browser, and any version of Opera or Konqueror. It is very simple CSS. IE's imcompatabilitys are a misconstrued legend. As long as you siwch with the W3C DOM, most script written cleanly will work.

And adding a compatability layer for Netscape 4.x is trivial on top of that, that is the only area you'd spend your time, in Netscape 4 compliance. And even that would take no more than 15 mins. Are you saying it isn't worth 30 dollars (actualy alot more if you have more than 5 web pages) to spend 15 mins writing some code? If you're paying your web guy 130 dollars an hour maybe, by my calculations, it may not be worth it. But then again, you'd be bankrupt already for overpaying your employees so it wouldn't be a problem.

Re:Building menuing into the browser

[lux55]

Very true. As web sites are more and more being referred to and thought of as applications, the need for an easy-to-implement toolkit to render and manipulate web-based GUIs is crucial. Something event-driven would be really nice too, so that maybe the screen-by-screen stateless interactions could be succeeded by more responsive methods and not require entire page reloads.

I see a lot of potential in the Mozilla browser architecture, specifically XUL, for providing something like this. XUL provides many of the more complex and more powerful widgets necessary to desktop applications, and as Mozilla is about to reach 1.0, with AOL even examining its rendering engine for their product, a standardized XUL could really boost web application possibilities to new heights.

This seems to be exactly where Java applets wanted to go, but failed due to its sluggishness, and it seems to be where Flash is trying to head also. I think we've all given up on Java in this space, but I'm excited to try the new Flash MX, with its built-in web widgets, and the new direction toward satisfying developer as opposed to designer needs. Because frankly, Flash 5 and under sucked if you were trying to develop anything but the tinyest applications.

XUL and Flash are two quite different approaches to the same problem, and each offer different benefits to developers. XUL is open, cross-platform, and can integrate with the client operating system as part of the actual browser, but currently requires Mozilla or Netscape 6, which is only a few percent of the web. Flash is much more widely available, plus a smaller download for users, and acceptably cross-platform (NS6 has Flash for Linux, etc.) for most developers, but it's still more of a vector animation tool than a GUI tool, and as such can present an awkward framework for developers to work with, and its not open (although the SWF format is).

Then again maybe things will change with the big web services push, or the "sematic web", or something new we haven't thought of yet (but some niece or nephew of Tim Berners-Lee has ;)).

Anyway, since there is really no point to this post, I'll wrap it up now. I just think it will be interesting to see where things head, and which technologies shine, in the next few years. Just compare 2002 so far with 1998, it's a very different Internet for sure.

FAST cross-browser drop menus, with PHP API

[lux55]

I wrote a mostly cross-browser (tested on Windows/MacOS 9 & X/Red Hat Linux, in Mozilla, Netscape4 & 6, Opera, IE5+) javascript/dhtml drop menu script. It's lightning fast because it renders the different menus to actual HTML divs instead of instantiating tons of JS objects, but at the expense of some customizability. Actually, you can still access everything in JavaScript, so the customizability is up to you. The best part is its less than 100 lines of JavaScript.

Oh, and it's got an object-oriented PHP api, so you can hook it up to your database-driven sites easy enough. I wrote it because I found the others ugly to have to interface with PHP, and they all seem to slow the browser to a crawl (even on my AMD 1.4GHz w/ 512MB DDR-RAM).

You can see it in action at this site, which is about to be re-launched. It's Open Source, but it's currently only downloadable through a package called Sitellite CMS, in the beta download. I'm preparing a new release of the core application framework behind this project, which is the Open Source part, which includes the drop menu stuff. That part is all contained in the 'saf' directory, and the drop menus are in lib/GUI inside that.

If you don't want the PHP API, you're of course free to just take the JavaScript from the source on the link above.