Xanjax News & Events

Timeline

Recent News

NEW!   Sept 22, 2008   PHP Server Pushlets!

Fancy the idea of displaying real time server events? Xanjax now offers PHP simulated server push, connecting asynchronously to receive server event data. This is achieved without client side polling, so has the lowest possible latency!

Sept 7, 2008   JSON Support, IE Class & Inline Style

Finally JSON support is in the bag. It's only preliminary at this stage but already does Menus and Lists. Download, Documentation and Demos coming!

Also, I had a break through with Internet Explorer style support for classes, and inline style defined directly in HTML elements. Opera version 9.51 caused a rework in document anchors which are used for navigation support.

Xanjax remains compatible with IE's 5.5, 6.1, 7.0, and with Firefox and Opera. Work is going on with Safari which can be made to work, but will probably not be able to use event driven navigation like all the others; due to an apparent document scrolling fault with hidden scrollbars. Also, Safari is painfully slow with its DOM handling, at least in the Windows version. Hopefully Safari's WebKit engine will be improved soon to take care of these issues.

May 18, 2008   Xanjax Now Hosted at GPLHost!

Xanjax is now hosted at gplhost.com on a Xen Virtual Private Server. Xen is open-source virtualisation software for running multiple operating systems simultaneously on a single computer. Thomas Goirand, CEO of GPLHost, has written DTC, an open-source domain and hosting control panel, which together with DTC-Xen (which he also wrote) provides the key to domain and hosting services on Xen virtual private servers.

Many thanks Thomas, not only for providing far superior hosting services, but also for providing xanjax.org with a valuable sponsorship.

April 10, 2008   Opera Going!

Opera was fixed by the addition of three lines of code to cancel onscroll bubbling from Xanjax's main content div - this seems like a bug in Opera, as window.onscroll responds to elements scrolling in Opera, not just the top level window or body.

April 3, 2008   pre-beta release

After many months part time work, and many interruptions, I've decided it's time to take Xanjax public.   Xanjax is free software licensed under the GNU Affero Public License Version 3.

At this time, Xanjax appears to be working in at least Firefox 2 and Internet Explorers 5.5, 6.1 and 7.0.   However there's much testing to be done still, so I'm only prepared to give this initial release pre-beta status!

Opera 9.0 is not all singing yet due to a bug with window.onscroll which apparently propogates all scroll events from divs, objects etc., rather than just the top level window.   There are workarounds using browser detects but I would use that option as an absolute last resort.   Anyone who can help me with Opera's unusual window.onscroll behaviour, please post on the blog. (It should be noted that both Opera and Firefox, due to mostly bug free comprehensive W3C compliance, can be made to work with much simpler tecniques than are required for any current version of IE, so this is NOT a criticism of Opera)

Konquerer apparently also has problems with window.onscroll (more serious - no event occurs) and with XMLHttpRequest and is therefore not going.   If you can help, please post to the blog.

Safari, and all the others are not even tested at all yet because I don't have access to them;   Again if you can help, please post results of any tests to the blog.

Lynx, Links, and Dillo all work, and other similar text only or non JavaScript browsers should work fine. Mobile phones and Palm style copmuters not tested at all.   Again if you can help, please post results of any tests to the blog.

Finally, please note that although Xanjax has been extensively developed to cater for the many quirks of Internet Explorer it has not been tested much under a Windows environment.   Although my Linux machine is also installed with licensed Windows XP, the only use I have for Windows is testing web pages under IE!   Even that is slow and cumbersome; which is why all development, and most testing, has been done under Linux (first Mandriva 2007, now Mandriva 2008), with popular browsers Firefox, Opera, and IE versions 5.5, 6.1 and 7.0 run simultaneously. IE's run under Wine (thanks to ies4linux), while Firefox and Opera run in Linux natively.   To date I have found testing web pages in IE's under Wine 100% valid, meaning that all faults found under Wine also appeared under Windows, but there's sure to be something ugly I haven't seen that will bob up to plague me when Windows users get busy.