Up to Main Index Up to Journal for May, 2019 JOURNAL FOR WEDNESDAY 22ND MAY, 2019 ______________________________________________________________________________ SUBJECT: Some days I wish I’d never started on the cottage… DATE: Wed 22 May 21:42:12 BST 2019 Recently “real life” has been keeping me very busy — I’ve have had little to no time to spend on either WolfMUD or TC[1]. That has not stopped my email from piling up, mostly to do with TC. The general gist of the emails: switch to ES6, forget Internet Explorer 11 or use a shim. Which leaves me in a pickle. Do I continue to use ES5 or move to ES6? The majority of the emails advocate moving to ES6 one way or another. If I move to ES6 what do I do about IE11? I could simply not support IE11 — after all Microsoft only includes IE11 in Windows 10 for compatibility, with Microsoft Edge being the default browser. Even Edge is being replaced with a new version built on Chromium[2]. It has been suggested I support IE11 using a shim like es6-shim[3]. However, due to their nature, shims cannot provide a complete ES6 experience. For example, they cannot provide support for syntax changes like template literals, spread syntax, rest parameters, arrow functions etc. For syntax changes you would need to use a transpiler like Babel[4]. For my little, ‘toy’ project I don’t want people to have to mess about with downloading or installing anything. If I wanted people to do that I’d have stopped at the Go or PHP version and have people download Go or PHP. The whole point behind the JavaScript version was that people already have everything they need to run and tweak TC — the browser. So, if people want the niceties of ES6 then it looks like I’m going to have to drop support for IE11. Not something I like doing, but I don’t see another choice :( On the plus side, for me anyway, it does make JavaScript a bit more pleasant to work with. On the other hand most browsers support ES5 with mostly 100% coverage… If you’ve not had your say yet, or have ideas, drop me an email. I’m going to be busy for a while yet before I make a final decision: diddymus@wolfmud.org -- Diddymus [1] Instead of repeating ‘The Cottage’ over and over I’ll just use TC. [2] Microsoft has stated[5] “Microsoft Edge will now be delivered and updated for all supported versions of Windows and on a more frequent cadence”. So it looks like the new Edge will be coming to Windows 7 and Window 8 while they are still supported. [3] es6-shim Homepage on GitHub: https://github.com/paulmillr/es6-shim [4] Babel transpiler: https://babeljs.io/ [5] Microsoft Windows Blog; Microsoft Edge: Making the web better through more open source collaboration: https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2018/12/06/microsoft-edge-making-the-web-better-through-more-open-source-collaboration/#ASDm6OX894luRVu7.97 Up to Main Index Up to Journal for May, 2019