Wow, another Alien

@Mr.Alien, are you there?

lol

Heeeyyy

Nice to see another alien :)

haaha same here :D

Are you a webmaster?

ummm well, not a master, but a dev

Cool, what type of dev?

web

right, but what technologies?

php, asp, jsp?

you can get all the info here :)

rails, django?

Oh, nice. I see. You're not just any web developer, you're a high reputable web developer.

lol, okay so I guess you can maybe answer this then. I need to know how to speak to my boss on this topic.

Our company has legacy web applications that work in old IE 8.

hmmm

go ahead

He wants some tool/technique to efficiently scan and tell how compatible would a site be with the modern browsers

basically wants to tell how forward compatible is a site that currently works in IE 8

Me and you know that a magical tool like this doesn't exist (or does it??). So I'm lost on how to convey this to him

are you looking for browsershots.org ?

also, tell him to stop supporting ie8

support 9+ or better with 10+

Well, isn't browsershots only good for layout issues? How about functionality breaks?

aah yes, I don't think any tool does that job

For example, a button no longer works. Browsershots would be unable to do something like that

right

So I need to convince him that the only way to migrate a site from IE 8 to IE X would be to do actual testing and refactoring the legacy code.

or better code the thing from scratch

lol, I wish. If we had the time and money to do that, I would suggest that right away. We are a monster with 200+ applications

That's why he was wondering if there was a tool or something

There is browser automation tools like selelium. But those would require coding the automation and it isn't one size fits all. Each site's automation would need to be customized, right?

aint sure as am core php dev, I never use any types of frameworks or other open source cms for my projects, everything I do is from scratch

oh okay. Well, it was nice to talk to another dev. Now I can tell him with confidence that there isn't such a thing.

yea, as far as I know, no tool will tell you that this is broken, unless you use some updated IDE and it points out the deprecated code

right

alright, I'm thinking of creating a pretty presentation to show him how websites works. The different layers of abstractions: FrontEnd (HTML/CSS & JS) + ServerSide (server side controls generating front end stuff).

that will be good

And then show him how complex a single website really is and that there is no way a single tool could figure that out

also it depends on what you want to test

say if you want to test whether X property is supported by a browser, you can use JS to check the unsupported properties...

yes, but these legacy applications are coded in different technologies. Who knows what's under the hood

Each application would need a specialized test effort

plus, very little documentation

hmmm

Anything else you have in mind that would be good to mention?

@AnAlien sorry was away, and am not having any detailed info about your thing so I cannot comment much, but surely, if the code is quiet old, you should be recoding those parts