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councilforeconed / interactive-activities

Council for Economic Education
http://interactives.councilforeconed.org
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Disable activities that don't work in IE #108

Closed stevekinney closed 10 years ago

stevekinney commented 10 years ago

Possibly one of the worst hacks I've ever committed. This temporarily disables activities that didn't work when I tested them in IE this morning. :cry:

ZeeJab commented 10 years ago

How important is IE for now? And are the things not being there more important than them looking weird?

stevekinney commented 10 years ago

Great question:

On one hand, no one involved—even Windows users—noticed any of these issues because no one used IE. That said, IE is still about 20% of all Internet traffic based on some really light research I did this morning.

Some of the issues I've noticed so far:

  1. You can't switch stations in Pizza Productivity
  2. You can't advance rounds in Money Creation
  3. There are some weird looking bugs in Money Creation
  4. One of my SVGs renders too small in Competition and Monopoly

I think the first and second might be event handling issues. (Maybe @jugglinmike has some insight.)

ZeeJab commented 10 years ago

I think for the first release don't disable them and get a count of what this products IE users are when people start using them vs. the internets # of users. The bigger things, like not being able to switch stations and advancing rounds should actually be fixed...but rendering issues can be looked passed for now, in my opinion. :rabbit:

stevekinney commented 10 years ago

Yea, so it's an interesting problem. On one hand, we have this constraint in the fact that these activities are highlighted in a book that is shipping out this coming week (no pressure) and we can't change what's printed in the book. Given that the target audience is teachers in classrooms with likely outdated computers and no admin access to update them (i.e. install Chrome or Firefox), this might be bad. This is also not necessarily a technologically-savvy audience.

On the other hand, teaching is a seasonal business, right? There is not a lot of teaching that goes on in July and August. So we may have time to fix it before anyone notices. On the third hand (the best hand), there might be some trainings on these activities over the summer. (Eh, maybe.)

That said, all this patch does is:

  1. Detect if they're using a Trident-based browser by sniffing the user agent
  2. Gray out the activities that have know issues if they are

If you come to the page in a Gecko or WebKit/Blink browser, everything works as normal. So, in Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, you see all of the activities, it's only in IE that some are disabled.

Here is my user story for this: I've been a teacher and I know that you can tell every student in the room to not use a particular browser for whatever reason. No mater what, a subset of your students will. This patch at least adds some level of warning—even if it does terrible things like user agent string sniffing. The goal is to remove friction in the classroom where you are directing 30 students to do something and there is a high margin of error.

ZeeJab commented 10 years ago

@stevekinney I concur :rabbit: