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                     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



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