One of the hardest parts of working on a startup is choosing which ideas not to work on, however fun they might be; I'm sure that everyone here can relate to one degree or another.
Looking back over some of my old files I came across an very early sketch for a project that I think certainly could have been interesting; Since my time is all going into building a new web-based version of Chron X (The original online collectible card game), I thought that someone else here might be interested in building the project instead.
As browsers advance, they continually add new features- New rendering modes (SVG), New options for tweaking things to look right (Layer transparency). It'd be nice if there were a way to offer something to older browsers, however primitive and hackish it might be.
From the other side, there are a lot of situations where you are forced to use an older browser- Company policy or a locked down workstation.. Sometimes the machine is just too old to run modern browsers at a decent speed. It'd be nice if there were a way to at least view these new-fangled CSS2 sites, even if it was a degraded experience.
I thought about it, and realized that the capability exists to display almost every modern website back on every browser to Netscape 2.0, but it's nearly forgotten about. ImageMaps.
ImageMaps allow you to click on any X,Y on an image, and send that coordinate back to the server. No Javascript involved, and it works everywhere. It's an incredibly useful technology, which allows us to do a great hack.
We can take a URL in from a web form, and spit out a jpeg of the screen, as an Imagemap. The browser gets back something simple which it understands, and which works everywhere. They just see the site, as the only response in the browser window.
If the user clicks on the Rendered Page, the power of ImageMaps tell us the exact XY he clicked on; This means we can then click on that exact XY on the server-side, send a click to the browser, then send back the new page.
This allows the user to click CSS/Javascript menus, Follow Links, and have the site Just Work.
On the back end, it's actually drop-dead simple to support. The way I saw it, you can just set up an EC2 instance, and install X11 and Firefox on it.. Then, install a script which lets you take screenshots of the active app, and send it mouseclicks with an XY relative to the program window, and get back screenshots.
Where would you get such a tool? It turns out, that today's your lucky day ;) I had one written, and you're welcome to it.
http://darkenedsky.com/ScreenshotTool.zip
If you end up picking up this project and running with it, shoot me an email and we can work out some license that makes sense for you. Apache, or MPL, or whatnot.
I think it's a fun idea, and could be useful both from the client side, and the web developer side. The same idea could be extended (trivially) to make a site that shows what it renders as using different browsers, for the web-developer who needs compatibility.
There are a few dozen different ways to take this concept, and I'm sure that if you run with it, more will come up. I'd love to be of any assistance that I can, and am certainly available to offer suggestions and advice.
Colin Davis
Producer, Darkened Sky Studios
ChronX.com