[TYPO3-dev] IE compatibility problems due to outdated JS libs

[Torben Hansen]

Hi all,

I've been working on an issue regarding drag and drop sorting of IRRE
elements in TYPO3 backend and stumbled across some problems creating an
acceptable solution.

The problem:
Drag and drop sorting of IRRE records relay on Scriptaculous and Prototype.
Both JS libs in the current TYPO3 master are outdated and the included
version of Prototype does not support IE9+. This leads to the situation,
that drag and drop sorting of IRRE records is not possible in IE9, IE10 and
IE11. Since a lot of business customers use IE, this problem should be
fixed in the upcoming LTS, since drag and drop sorting is the only way to
sort for example FAL media relations in the page module.

I have filed a bugreport here http://forge.typo3.org/issues/51768 and did
some debugging about this issue.

Possible solutions:
1. Update Prototype to latest version
Doing this, there will surely be other issues (beside the one I already
found) with other TYPO3 backend components.

2. Keep Prototype 1.6.0.3 and just backport the code that fixes IE related
click events
Not very future safe.

3. Rewrite IRRE drag and drop sorting to rely on another JS sorting
technique
Maybe the best solution, but which JS framework should be used? JQuery UI?
If it is just for the sorting, this is a very heavyweight solution. Or this
one https://github.com/farhadi/html5sortable? Should work good, but seems
unmaintained (22 pull requests).

4. Reinvent the wheel

Mayby some of the Active Contributors can give feedback about which
solution fits best.

Best regards
Torben