[annotator-dev] Cross-browser support, cont'd.

[Bill Hunt]

Hi everyone,

I've been continuing to work on adding support for older browsers, focusing on IE back to 8 at the moment.  Right now I've got *most* of the test suite running successfully - using a handful of shims - but I've had to circle back to working on the xpath-range plugin to get the Highlighter tests to pass.

Quick history:

Original IE ticket from 2012:
https://github.com/openannotation/annotator/issues/173

Current issue:
https://github.com/openannotation/annotator/issues/428

Thread on Range implementation from June of this year:
https://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/annotator-dev/2014-June/000944.html

xpath-range issues on the topic:
https://github.com/openannotation/xpath-range/issues/3
https://github.com/openannotation/xpath-range/issues/4
https://github.com/openannotation/xpath-range/issues/5

The short version is, using Rangy as an interface (not just a shim) is providing most of the behavior we need for support.  There are a few outstanding major issues, such as #5:

IE8 (and several other browsers) produce rather inconsistent results when you're reading the contents of DOM nodes that have newlines in/between them - some include this extra whitespace, others don't. As a result, it's kind of hard to test predictably the way that we're currently doing it.  I don't know that stripping whitespace in the test helper is necessarily the best way to handle this. We will need to alert users of the inconsistency of course.

I'd really appreciate any insight or feedback that anyone has on this - please feel free to jump in on any of those tickets.   I also don't know what kind of impact fuzzy anchoring may have on this, if any. 

Cheers,
-Bill

Bill Hunt
Senior Developer
OpenGov Foundation
http://opengovfoundation.org/
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