modern.ie

We are planning to update our very old web application so that it works better with modern web browsers. I have heard of modern.ie in the past and decided to give it a try. The site has a scanner that can scan a URL entered by a user. Unfortunately, our site requires log-in before getting to the page we want to scan. Fortunately, the site also offers a downloadable scanner that we can use in our local development environment.

I downloaded the scanner. It is packaged as a zip file. I unzipped the package and open the readme file. The tools requires node.js to work. Fortunately, it is fairly easy to setup the tool following the instructions. Firstly, download and install node.js; accept all defaults. The setup will add Node.js to the path. Although Node.js is known for hosting asynchronous web applications, it is actually just a javascript executing environment. Next, I open the command prompt, change to the directory that I unzipped the modern.ie tool and run “node lib/service.js”. A node hosted web server is listening on port 1337 so we just need to open a web browser and points to http://localhost:1337/. We can then enter the URL of a web page to scan. The scanner submits the data to modern.ie and a report is generated. The report is very good and it offers many suggestions and links that helps us to improve the page.