The IE6 Demoscene

There's an active community of people in the demoscene writing code for long-"obsolete" platforms like C64, Atari, NES, etc. These platforms are slow, quirky, and relatively limited, yet they can do all these amazing things with them.

Seeing all these HTML5 "new features" demos, the thought occurred to me: what can we do with a more limited browser? Not something really limited like Lynx, but something still considered obsolete yet maybe more powerful than most people would think. How about IE6? It has JavaScript so you can write programs in it, lots of undocumented/buggy behaviour, and relatively slow, so could be compared to a C64 in some ways. (Lynx would be like a 4004.) What sort of things can you do with it? Should there be a demoscene category "Platform: IE6"?

Discuss.

Demoscene is a useless waste of human and machine time. "Creativity" should be banned for good.

Lynx is great you fucking heretic. Motherfucking GO FREEDOM!!

The HP-UX and Solaris versions only went up to IE5, so no.

>>2

>>2
So you're a code monkey.

>>3
You mean Lynux?

>>6
No. I'm a fascist. I want all these Malevich, Kandinsky and Picasso kikes dead.

There should be no art, but market research and production based on demand of target auditory. That is why I love anime - it is a very mechanistic phenomena, with all its fanservice.

Billy G in da house yo!

>>8

>>10
Goldman
Shalom!

Porn is a useless waste of human and machine time. "Masturbation" should be banned for good.

>>10
>>11

Oy Vey!

>>12
That's why us Americans circumcise our kids.

>>14
America is a Jewish shithole.

IE6 is faster and less bug ridden than all the current versions of every major browser out there, what are you talking about "IE6 is slow"?

>>16
gr8 b8 m8

>>17
ebin le memes bor muh lelfaces when le lels were had

See, this is why the web is terrible.  It was supposed to be an information network that was device independent and could gracefully degrade to whatever was currently viewing it.  But then faggots took over and we now consider browsers ``platforms'', and people talk about targetting these platforms.

>>19
I agree completely, although many of the features that MS added in IE were in that direction too. It's just stupid that everyone else decided to go in a completely different direction, often reinventing stuff. Examples: userData (DOM storage), ActiveX (Google Native Client), etc.

The other day I discovered that RWI, one of our flagship AJAX web applications, required only 2 lines of code changes to get working in IE6. One particular page uses 12.5MB there, while it takes over 60MB in a relatively recent (<6 months old) version of Firefox and 59MB in Chrome (2 processes)! A rather old pre-HTML5 version of Opera takes 16.8MB, which is pretty good. Keeping in mind that this page works in all of the above browsers, WTF is going on?

>>20
I agree completely...
Cudder you're just butthurted kike, because nobody needs your Jewish x86 and assembly skills anymore. If CPU runs Firefox, then it is an acceptable CPU, even if it's ARM or MIPS. And video games now completely run on GPU.

>>19
It's only yourself that's stopping yourself from using HTML4. The rest of the world has different visions and different goals, everyone else will use HTML5 and all the other web technologies.

>>21
x86 - JEW
assembly - JEW
Firefox - JEW
ARM - JEW
video game - JEW

>>23
Shalom, Hymie!

>>20
reinventing #2 source of windows vulnerabilities of all time
just stupid
mfw ActiveX LEL

>>20
>Keeping in mind that this page works in all of the above browsers, WTF is going on?
Different approaches and internal web data structuring, data caching, javascript engine differences, and OS platform rendering differences.

>>24
Peace, stud!

>>20
>Firefox takes 50MB more than IE6 to display a page.
Yes, and winXP takes more memory than DOS, which clearly means that WinXP is the cancer killing operating systems.

Stay subhuman, jewdder.

>>20
Is it acceptable to trade space for simplicity, correctness, consistency and completeness?

I don't blame Microsoft for trying to make new features, competition is good after all. What I really hate is their snail pace to implement established standards in their products.

>>22
I do use HTML4 when I (thankfuly rarely) have occasion to create things that are consumed by browsers.  But ``everyone else'' is a collection of idiots for paying web ``devs'' to use these new ``web technologies'' for no apparent reason.

Also, shiichan is shit because it breaks dillo.

sage this shit
cudder you're dumb

>>33
Sweet dubs.

>>32
Arigatou ^________^

How come Cudder always has the shittiest ideas?

>>30
the only thing I enjoyed about HTML5 was being able to have decent platform-independent video and audio playback by using <audio> (and both mp3 and ogg sources), then a lightweight flash fallback nested inside (with that IF IE to make it work for IE), then a fallback for text browsers with a link to the song/video to be downloaded.

Still would be better if we had one standard for playback formats, or if browsers were format agnostic. Oy vey!

You should check out the gopher scene, OP.

>>36
OP

Don't hesitate to call ``OP'' by his official name, which is JEWDDER.

I love JEWDDER. I love JEWS. I'm sad because Shabbat is over. I frigging love Shabbat.

>>35
I think that could have been handled much better.  Why only audio and video?  What if smell-o-vision becomes a reality, will we have to wait for HTML6 to use <smell> tags?  What if I want to embed text files for side-by-side comparison on my site, but I don't want to fuck around with javascript and would prefer to let the browser handle it?

Rather, I believe simple <a> tags should be inspectable by the browser, so if you link to a .ogm file and a user views it with a browser that can detect .ogm, the browser could, at the user's request, embed the content instead of simply treating it as a link.  "But," you say, "doesn't that mean that I have to write separate tags for multiple file formats to cover all the possible browsers?"  Yes, it does, but you're already doing that anyway!  This just allows a user who prefers H.264 over Theora to download H.264 himself anyway, even if his browser of choice feels uneasy about patents, and allows the content to gracefully degrade if you're using IE5 or something.

>>25
They could've taken ActiveX and done the same sort of validation that NativeClient does, instead of reinventing the whole damn thing. And vulnerabilities are only an issue if they're exploitable, which in this case means don't let all sites use those features, only a trusted subset. [Another area where Firefox and Chrome FAIL compared to IE - per-site/per-zone configurable security settings. The latter two by default are basically all-or-nothing. But that's a rant for another day...]

>>26
In other words, some browsers are vastly more inefficient.

>>29
Standards has nearly nothing to do with it; look at Opera, it's much more aligned with the spec but doesn't need to use several times more memory to do it. There's also no obligation for anyone to follow standards, and they're basically only doing it when it makes sense to from a pragmatic perspective. Look at GNU for example,

I said "nearly nothing" because there are clearly certain features that just aren't easy to implement, and in that case they're better off not being used. (In the C++ world the export feature is an example of this.)

>>39
There's already the <object> tag for embedding ANY media you want...
What if I want to embed text files for side-by-side comparison on my site, but I don't want to fuck around with javascript and would prefer to let the browser handle it?
I have no idea why you mention that use case, but that's trivial:
<table><tr><td><iframe src="file1.txt"></iframe><td><iframe src="file2.txt"></iframe></table>
(unless you're one of those brainwashed "web developers" who can't see a simple solution if it hit you in the face...)