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.

>>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...)