The folks at Sencha have long used their project and api documentation as a technology demonstration; the javascript they apply admits no graceful degradation, harming searchability, the reading capability of the disabled and usability. Especially agrivating in the ExtJS3 series documentation are the pseudo-tabs: clicking a “link” in the API will spawn a new “tab” inside of the documentation/application which do not persist across reloads and/or the space of about 30 minutes. The new ExtJS4 series has seemingly improved somewhat, but not much. Clicking a link in the documentation sends me to the requested resource, sure, but I get chucked randomly down the page. Scrolling focus has been overloaded and replaced—now not only must I have focus in my browser window—which I’m used to—but I have to have focus in their sub-window, with no visual clue other than my own mouse pointer straying too close to some visually ill-defined pseudo-scrollbar.
The project that I’m on dictates the use of ExtJS, but this seems crazy. And, you know, the Sencha team does things that I find really goofy but almost any and all web-dev application work I’ve had contact with feels something like this: cobbled together, non-deterministically functional and astoundingly difficult to get right.
Blech.
(Incidentally, using Chromium 12.0.742.100 I get chucked to the end of the above link. Firefox 4.0.1 is okay. Write once, test everywhere on every version?)
