Improved Safari 4 rendering trips WordPress

UPDATE (12th April 2009): The WordPress folks seemed to have solved this problem now, despite their earlier refusal to do so. Cheers to them!

Newer, faster JavaScript engines pose a new minefield for web developers. Unlike XHTML or CSS, there is no JavaScript standard to rely upon.

For example, some of WordPress’s buttons and pop-ups seem to have broken in Safari 4.  Basically, it looks like the new JavaScript rendering engine doesn’t like their code.

The pop-up’s don’t seem to work, locking the window behind the pop-up mask, and some of the buttons seem to be non-functional.

I reported the issue and was told they “can’t” support beta browsers, but the issue goes deeper than that. If the code fails now it may also fail when that “beta” browser goes mainstream, and there was no indication that they had any intention of checking it.

UPDATE : WordPress responded to this post via email, so I won’t post their generally balanced but slightly grumpy response…

I’m really sorry I annoyed the folks at WordPress. They do have a great product, and I thought they’d like to know that it wasn’t working properly in Apple’s new browser.

Apparently not. Maybe I should explain myself further…

I guess we’ll just have to wait and see whether WordPress is still broken when Safari 4 gets a proper release, but my point was actually about Standards, and how developers can get tripped by them from time to time.

Automattic have claimed, correctly, that because this is a Beta release they won’t be supporting it. However Safari 4 Beta is the only browser (excluding developer-only nightly builds) to pass the Acid3 test for rendering. Acid3 specifically tests ECMAScript and DOM rendering. The browser’s WordPress currently support get at best 75%, so there will be some changes, and Safari 4 is likely to herald them, just as Firefox 3 forced some sites to change their CSS. There’s a good chance that the issues affecting WordPress will be seen elsewhere too.

Microsoft has been through a similar issue recently, trying to decide how Internet Explorer 8 should render old websites aimed at Explorer 7.

I’m sure the folks at Automattic know all this, other WordPress users have found the problem also. I did seem to annoy them however.