Hi jglick,
Now that css3 is almost main stream, is it OK to remove IE filter from style.css?

@evernat perhaps; I really have no idea what this particular entry is for, or which versions of IE need it. (I know people still routinely use Jenkins with IE 9, maybe even 8.) In any event, my original suggestion of splitting browser-specific entries into dynamically inserted stylesheets would suppress the test warnings and probably also suppress warnings from modern browsers which no longer require the hacks.

after a google search,

• opacity: 0.5; works since IE9 and in all modern browsers.
• filter: alpha(opacity=50); works for IE8 and before
• -ms-filter: "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=50)"; also works for IE8 and before

IE8 is certainly used only by users still having Windows XP, because they can't upgrade to IE9. But Windows XP is EOL and not supported anymore since yesterday. So IE8 usage will now drop fast like Windows XP usage.

So I think that we can remove both -ms-filter and filter: alpha lines.

FWIW, a quick (~3min) search of support tickets from CloudBees customers reveals five companies (before I stopped counting) who are using IE 8 to access Jenkins. Some of these explicitly state (by way of apology) that IE 8 is the corporate IT mandate. So I doubt we can drop support for it so casually. Of course inessential aspects of its rendering could be skipped so long as the page view is still functional, if that simplifies the CSS.

I think Tom is best placed to work on this at the moment.

By the way we are running a very old version of HtmlUnit: 2.6 (2009), patched for Jenkins for reasons I do not know. The current version is 2.14.

Also we see this annoying warning for every page load:

… com.gargoylesoftware.htmlunit.javascript.host.Document jsxFunction_createElement
SEVERE: Unexpected exception occurred while parsing HTML snippet
… com.gargoylesoftware.htmlunit.javascript.StrictErrorReporter runtimeError
SEVERE: runtimeError: message=[Unexpected exception occurred while parsing HTML snippet: input name="x"] sourceName=[http://localhost:…/jenkins/static/…/scripts/prototype.js] line=[1927] lineSource=[null] lineOffset=[0]

caused by:

  var HAS_EXTENDED_CREATE_ELEMENT_SYNTAX = (function(){
    try {
      var el = document.createElement('<input name="x">');
      return el.tagName.toLowerCase() === 'input' && el.name === 'x';
    }
    catch(err) {
      return false;
    }
  })();

I think http://sourceforge.net/p/htmlunit/bugs/1338/ is discussing this, though I cannot find any BrowserVersionFeatures.GENERATED_153 either in the version of HtmlUnit we run or in the current version; the current code treats this construction as an error if HtmlUnit is simulating Firefox, which we are (see JenkinsRule.WebClient.<init>). http://htmlunit.sourceforge.net/apidocs/com/gargoylesoftware/htmlunit/BrowserVersionFeatures.html#JS_DOCUMENT_CREATE_ELEMENT_EXTENDED_SYNTAX looks like the current replacement, but from http://sourceforge.net/p/htmlunit/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/htmlunit/src/main/java/com/gargoylesoftware/htmlunit/javascript/host/Document.java it seems that when using newer versions and simulating FF we would get the same error.

The real issue is that even though Prototype catches and ignores the error, HtmlUnit logs it as a warning. I will see if I can just suppress this.

I have added a temporary workaround to just suppress the CSS warnings until they can be fixed, so that people running tests will not be confused by them (as has happened recently).

Code changed in jenkins
User: Jesse Glick
Path:
test/src/main/java/org/jvnet/hudson/test/JenkinsRule.java
http://jenkins-ci.org/commit/jenkins/759c8a52ce4dfb40c8834e3ccab27940eb0b5ed2
Log:
JENKINS-14749 Temporarily work around CSS errors by just suppressing the warnings until they can be fixed.

Code changed in jenkins
User: Jesse Glick
Path:
test/src/main/java/org/jvnet/hudson/test/JenkinsRule.java
http://jenkins-ci.org/commit/jenkins/84d49ceef2d68eebc9854800693d385c104752ba
Log:
JENKINS-14749 Suppress warnings about expected exception from prototype.js#HAS_EXTENDED_CREATE_ELEMENT_SYNTAX.

Integrated in jenkins_main_trunk #3524
JENKINS-14749 Temporarily work around CSS errors by just suppressing the warnings until they can be fixed. (Revision 759c8a52ce4dfb40c8834e3ccab27940eb0b5ed2)
JENKINS-14749 Suppress warnings about expected exception from prototype.js#HAS_EXTENDED_CREATE_ELEMENT_SYNTAX. (Revision 84d49ceef2d68eebc9854800693d385c104752ba)

Result = SUCCESS
Jesse Glick : 759c8a52ce4dfb40c8834e3ccab27940eb0b5ed2
Files :

• test/src/main/java/org/jvnet/hudson/test/JenkinsRule.java

Jesse Glick : 84d49ceef2d68eebc9854800693d385c104752ba
Files :

• test/src/main/java/org/jvnet/hudson/test/JenkinsRule.java

Code changed in jenkins
User: Jesse Glick
Path:
test/src/main/java/org/jvnet/hudson/test/JenkinsRule.java
http://jenkins-ci.org/commit/jenkins-test-harness/5579220ac86c41a8851ebf7215a9fa629785a56f
Log:
JENKINS-14749 Temporarily work around CSS errors by just suppressing the warnings until they can be fixed.
Originally-Committed-As: 759c8a52ce4dfb40c8834e3ccab27940eb0b5ed2

Code changed in jenkins
User: Jesse Glick
Path:
test/src/main/java/org/jvnet/hudson/test/JenkinsRule.java
http://jenkins-ci.org/commit/jenkins-test-harness/f99c9c00543dacd23b681f311654c442ac6de2bd
Log:
JENKINS-14749 Suppress warnings about expected exception from prototype.js#HAS_EXTENDED_CREATE_ELEMENT_SYNTAX.
Originally-Committed-As: 84d49ceef2d68eebc9854800693d385c104752ba