Substance Surface/Composer and old IE

[Wes Winham]

Hi Folks,

First off, I love this project. I've been following since 2011 because we share a lot of similar goals. Normal, non-technical folks should be able to create well-structured documents that expose their data well enough to be publishable everywhere (desktop browsers, mobile browsers, various ebook formats, print, etc). I've been maintaining WYMeditor as a tool towards the same goal, though with a much more limited scope.

Other than fairly recent emergence Sir Trevor, Substance's Composer and WYMeditor are still the only editors around that maintain that focus. 

The big thing holding me back from contributing time and budget to either Sir Trevor or the Substance Surface/Composer is the lack of old IE support. Our product is used mostly by hospitals and other large enterprise folks who still use IE7, IE8 and IE9 extensively. The end for IE7 is nigh, but IE8 and IE9 are supported on Vista and Windows 7, so look to be around for quite some time.

What are the technical prospects of (gracefully degraded) support for IE8 in the composer, via polyfills? I think Substance's model of storing a document's data as JSON is superior, but I couldn't abandon the WYMeditor users who need IE8 support without a migration path.

Thanks

-Wes

[Michael Aufreiter]

Hi Wes!

Supporting legacy browsers is not a priority for us at the moment. We circumvent this problem by wrapping the app in a native shell for all major OS. That way we can use modern browser technology while not having to invest a lot of time into cross-browser issues. We are not giving up the online-editing scenario.. but providing the editor as a offline app has priority at the moment.

Cheers, Michael