jQuery version update

[fu]

We've just upgraded to the latest jQuery / jQuery UI version. I'd eventually like to settle us on jQuery 1.9 which according to their road map is the final one with support for older browsers, and will retain compatibility with 2.0 (which is lighter, by dropping said support for older browsers).

I've updated our own code as much as i could, to use the newer APIs, in some cases replacing our implementation with newly added functionality built into the library. I've also switched the tooltips from tooltip.js, to jquery ui's tooltips because the API fits everything else we use better and, more importantly, it's got people working on it who are focused on accessibility issues (so ARIA support, plus whatever else might be added in the future)

This gets rid of a schroedenbug with the contextualhover menu sometimes disappearing as soon as it appears at the risk of introducing new bugs. It overall seems to behave better, and was easier to debug, but do keep an eye out for weird behavior and let us know ASAP.

The contextualhover menu appearance has been changed; we have a bug open for actual further styling.

The light-colored theme for widgets has been tweaked just a tiny bit here and there. Most noticeable will probably be that dialog boxes/overlays now have a font size that matches the rest of the page, instead of being larger.

This isn't live on dreamwidth.org, but is on the develop branch, so you can poke at it. We'll push it live by next code push. If there aren't any major issues, we can take the jquery on journals out of beta shortly thereafter.

Comments

[andrewducker]

Does DW have a massive mix of browsers?

I'm sure there's the odd mix of people with IE6, or using screen-readers.

[mark]

40% Firefox, 40% Chrome, 11% Safari, 6% IE, 2% Android, 1% Opera, <1% the rest.

Firefox: 65% on v16, 18% on v17, 3% on v15, and <2% on any other version.
Chrome: 90% are on v23+.
Safari: version numbers are weird...
IE: 50% on v9, 30% on v8, 10% on v7, 2% on v6.

So -- IE is 6% of our traffic, and IE6 is 2% of that... which means it's almost ignorable. Screen readers we will support, though, although IIRC most of that support comes by working towards HTML5 and WAI-ARIA support. (Although that's all frontend which is not really my cup of tea, so apologies if I am misstating something here.)

Edited: These numbers are from our Google Analytics data.

[andrewducker]

So that leaves about 2.4% of your users on IE7/8, which is more than you can reasonably ignore, hence jquery 1.9. Seems like a sound decision.

I found this post interesting: http://blog.jquery.com/2012/06/28/jquery-core-version-1-9-and-beyond/

I assume that using the suggestion there to supply different versions to different browsers wouldn't work?

[fu]

We could do that! Thanks for the link.

I think that would be worth looking at once jquery 1.9 and 2.0 are released and have been out in the wild for a while -- just to give other people the chance to pound on it first.