It worked. The knowledge these guys passed on accelerated what the BBC can offer which will continue to trickle down to the developers and most importantly, the users of the sites.

Awesome work Jake & co.

where can i vote with 0 stars? :>

This: http://www.itv.com/TVGuide/ is horrible.

Browser developers do not bend for JS libraries. They break them. The idea that jQuery is future-proof because lots of clueless developers use it is ridiculous. As we have seen, it doesn’t even work in the present.

And your users will not blame their browsers. They don’t know anything except your site doesn’t work (and they sure don’t know what jQuery is!)

“2% may be proportionally small, but that’s still a large number of licence fee paying users for the BBC.”

When you get into the “under 2% old browser” category, we’re talking about browsers like IE 5.5 and Fx 1.5. My point is that I doubt most users running a browser that old even want something beyond a basic HTML site, anything more is probably too expensive for their system.

I’ve never seen feature detection as anything more that a slightly-more-clever browser detection that is still likely to break somewhere along the way. The real solution here is already happening–jQuery (and Prototype, Dojo, MooTools) have a small enough code base and are used in so many places they they are future-proofing themselves just by becoming nearly ubiquitous.

Take Chrome as an example. Chrome made a huge effort to “work with the web as it existing,” testing against real-world web sites. A lot of them have jQuery. So if I use jQuery, or if code the way jQuery is coded, I’m more safe than if I make an effort to follow “standards.” And that’s simply because if a browser breaks on jQuery, the browser, not jQuery, looks broken and unstable.

Though creating 1 framework to rule all is madness, code will constantly break each time the browsers go up a generation.

Instead… Look at dynamic loading of js libraries.

create 1 library for crappy old browsers and 1 compliant library for modern browsers. If the dynamic loading is handled properly, you will NEVER ever have to update the crappy browser library (unless adding new functionatlity ofc).

Nay, whilst the effort is admirable and deserves a serious pat on the back, glow isn’t really the best decision, it will be maintenance hell.

SPLIT IT UP before you get into a real mess!

The DRM argument makes no sense to me. All of this stuff is broadcast for free over the airwaves, loads of non-geeks now use digital recorders, and the iPlayer isn’t in any way secure as it stands (I use the get_iplayer script which pretends to be an iPhone and lets me have any TV/radio off it for keeps, though sadly the TV comes as .mov).

Anyway, sorry to have a go at you and feel free to ignore as I realise this is nothing to do with you. Glow looks like a great technical achievement and I think it’s great that the BBC are willing to open source stuff like this and Dirac.

I assume you’re joking, but just in case you’re not…

There’s a big difference between using something because you wish to, and using something because you have to.

I couldn’t, for instance, download NN3 and start demanding that the BBC should support it.

When it comes to browser support the BBC give more weight to users who cannot upgrade their browser. So, we could end up supporting browser A but not B, if many users of A cannot upgrade, even if there are a greater number of users using browser B.

With your Ogg Theora example, we’d be benefiting users of very modern browsers without Flash. However, this number is extremely small and I’m not aware of a case when users may be ‘stuck’ in this configuration.

Also, I’m sure our DRM overlords would spontainiously combust at the thought (I don’t work on iplayer so my opinion is personal here).