javascript:alert(document.compatMode);

which will pop up a box stating either “BackCompat” for Quirks mode, or “CSS1Compat” for Strict mode.

If you’re using Firefox and have the Bookmarks toolbar visible, you can drag the following link on to it to create a handy little button you can use to check which rendering mode the browser is in on any page you visit. In Internet Explorer, right-click on the link and select “Add to Favorites…” to achieve the same thing. (You’ll get a warning that the link “may not be safe”; at that point you have to decide how much you trust me. Believe me, it’s safe.)
Rendering mode

I find this tremendously useful for doing checks on pages, particularly when editing pages by hand, where a simple typo might throw a page into Quirks mode, with resultant frustration as CSS which previously worked suddenly goes completely to pot.

(Note that the “CSS1Compat” actually means “CSS2Compat” in browsers with support for CSS 2.1.)

By the time we got onto these topics we’d moved outside, and numbers had decreased considerably; perhaps as a result of this, decisions were made fairly quickly (if they were made at all). In short, the results were:

1. Naming: We’ll call it DOM Scripting;
2. The dreaded onload problem: All the things you’d think would work don’t. However Mozilla has an undocumented DOMContentLoaded event (which is probably to be standardised), and Dean Edwards explained that it is possible to provide support for this using IE behaviors (.htc files). I’m planning to do some experimentation on this one to see what the best approach is when working with other browsers, although I’m probably just repeating Dean’s work.
3. We’d all drunk enough by then that the discussion of Design Patterns drifted off into speculation about the noise a bagpipe band would make marching off a cliff and other important topics, but I’ll probably carry on with my advocacy of object oriented tehniques (suitably adapted to JavaScript’s strengths and weaknesses) until others point out how utterly wrong I am.

So to summarise, you should expect to see a lot of writing coming out from this point onwards designed to propagate the meme of DOM Scripting, which can be defined as the process of enhancing web pages by adding a behaviour layer which beefs things up using standards-based techniques, degrades gracefully when JavaScript support is absent, and doesn’t interfere with accessibility when it isn’t absent.

If you’re wondering what that last bit means, consider the revelation brought to us by Derek Featherstone: screen readers may not support JavaScript, but the browsers they read from do. Some of the implications of this are covered by Derek in this follow-up to his @media presentation, and I have no doubt it’s something we’ll hear a lot more discussion about in the future. It means we’ve got to forget about just testing with JavaScript turned off if we want to be accesible, and that means rethinking a lot of things.

Finally, thanks to everybody for making Saturday afternoon such an enjoyable and informative gathering. I hope to catch up with you all again; if not before, there’s always @media 2006.

P.S.: if you’re looking for more info about the presentations at @media, don’t miss Isofarro’s excellent notes and transcripts.

Netscape invented ABBR, while Microsoft invented ACRONYM, and both types meant the same thing. Then the W3C incorporated both in HTML 3, but with subtly different semantics. Microsoft’s meaning of ACRONYM was replaced by something different, which made the people at Microsoft so furious that to this day they still don’t support the ABBR element type!

as I came across a manifestation of this (possibly imaginary) dislike for the abbr element in Internet Explorer quite recently.

Consider the following markup fragment:

One would expect a browser which supports HTML 4 (which IE is claimed to have done since version 4) to produce a DOM structure as follows:

• Element: p
  • Text: An example of an abbreviation might be
  • Element: abbr
    • Text: Ltd.
  • Text: , used in the UK to denote a private company with limited liability.

Whereas IE actually produces the following:

• Element: p
  • Text: An example of an abbreviation might be
  • Element: abbr
  • Text: Ltd.
  • Element: /abbr
  • Text: , used in the UK to denote a private company with limited liability.

Yes, that’s correct: the initial abbr is parsed into an element, the text within remains as a childNode of the paragraph, and an element with the name /abbr is created.

If you try to use the createElement method of the document to create such an element, you naturally get an exception. But internally, IE manages to create an element whose name begins with a slash.

I don’t have a PC at home, so I can’t check right now whether or not spurious markup like Hello produces the same result, but I’ll check at work tomorrow and report back.

Long-delayed update: The example above does indeed produce the same results.