[OmniX]

question: how does Safari's javascript implementation work, and how is it different from the js implementations in Win/IE and Mozilla/Firefox?

This thought was prompted by the recent introduction of Google Maps, an very cool online application of sorts that relies heavily on Javascript, but which only works on the Win/IE and Mozilla/Firefox platforms. Why does Google (and any other Javascript developer) have to do additional work to get their app to work on Safari/Mac OS X? And for anyone with relevant experience, exactly how much work does Google actually need to do to make GoogleMaps compatible with Safari's JS implementation?

tx,
ox

[Millennium]

Safari does still have some issues with frames and LiveConnect, but unless I am mistaken Google Maps uses neither.

Safari's Debug Menu only has one User-Agent choice which gets through to Google Maps at all, and that's IE6/Windows. Going into Google Maps with that browser doesn't work, however, because they use VML, a Microsoft-proprietary technology.

When you look at the site in Firefox, however, it doesn't seem to use anything terribly exotic. There are a few errors in the CSS, but that's all I see.

[Chuckit]

Safari does apparently have some missing functionality that Moz and IE have. I'm not enough of a JavaScript guru to explain exactly what all it is, but this is also the reason Blogger offers for why its WYSIWYG editor doesn't work on Safari. However, Blogger says that this appears to be fixed in new builds of Safari (citing Hyatt's blog), so maybe Google Maps has some hope too.

[Millennium]

The rich-text editing API for JavaScript has never been formally standardized, and the problem is that the new Safari doesn't use the de-facto standard standard method, which is called "designMode" or "Midas" depending on who you ask. Instead they use a competing API called "contentEditable". Note that neither contentEditable nor designMode is a formal name; they're called these because those are the names of the JavaScript properties used to turn them on.

IE implements both designMode and contentEditable, because they were both created by Microsoft in the first place. Gecko implements only designMode, and it calls this Midas. Because they can both work with designMode, many rich-text editors today are implemented around it, so that they can be used cross-platform. Safari, however, appears to be implementing only contentEditable, and this is going to cause problems.

[Thinine]

Safari 2 will at least support contentEditable, but I'm not sure about designMode.

[Visnaut]

Since it's in beta, It'll probably gain Safari support later, much like Gmail did.

Regardless, when used in Firefox, it's very slick. Probably one of the best featured, least cluttered map sites I've used. A lil slow for me, but that's probably my connection at the moment.

[JLL]

Originally posted by Visnaut:
Since it's in beta, It'll probably gain Safari support later, much like Gmail did.

Did the "We are working on supporting Safari." tip you off?