Comments on: The great divide

By: NatalieMac

NatalieMac — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 00:35:00 +0000

Once IE8 takes hold, browsers compliant with the current standards will comprise nearly 100% of the market. The specs for CSS3, HTML5, and XHTML2 aren’t finished yet, and while browser manufacturers can start to experiment with implementing these new standards, it’s unreasonable to expect them to invest a lot of time and effort into implementing standards that aren’t finished yet and might change.

As long as a browser provides me with standards support, I don’t care if they add extra features on top of that – especially if they are enhancements that degrade gracefully. If I don’t like them, I won’t use them, and if I like reflections or text shadows, then they’ll be enhancements for the browsers that support them and the people using other browsers won’t miss a thing.

So many of the standards we have now began as proprietary features in one browser or another – the browsers competing against one another has historically been the biggest driver of innovation in web technology. If browser manufacturers weren’t innovating and adding new features, we’d have to depend on the standards bodies to innovate – and we see how slowly that happens. The CSS 2.1 spec is ten years old.

So I say, as long as you’re implementing standards, go ahead and innovate. If you produce something useful that enhances the web, the other browsers will pick it up, the standards bodies will pick it up and it will eventually become a standard.

By: Anthony Short

Anthony Short — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 03:05:36 +0000

The differences between the browsers are slowly closing. The best solution would be for each of the browsers to adopt a single rendering engine, and apply extensions to it so they will all render exactly the same under the CSS3 spec. If browsers such as Safari want to expand and test new waters, they can implement their drop shadows, variables etc. But are optional extras.

These extra properties won’t make much of a difference. It’s selectors that need to be consistent.

However, they’re all too stubborn to even consider that option. They’re more concerned with business rather than how far we can push the boundaries of web development for the future.

By: Buzu

Buzu — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 23:22:05 +0000

Oh no! that sounds bad, but we all know that. The true is that simple web developers can make the difference, but some just don’t want to do it. It’s easy, just ask your self Why in the world do I want a reflection in my pictures? When you realize that you don’t want or at least you don’t need that reflection, you’ll be able to not to use it. Then if you don’t use it, why would they want to continue working on that? It’s just easy, the best way to force them to develop standard browsers is keeping your websites standard and showing that you don’t want to use any cool effect unless it it standard. It’s hard to believe, but it’s true. Oh, by the way,if we have an XHTML why do we want an HTML 5?

By: Peter Gasston

Peter Gasston — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 21:40:59 +0000

I don’t agree. When IE8 launches we will, for the first time, have four major browsers (or browser engines) with a solid baseline implementation of CSS2.1. On top of that, we’ll have a load of experimental features implemented in three of those four which will help immensely the development of CSS3 & HTML5 – and, they should all degrade elegantly.

One thing that’s much better now than in the original ‘browser war’ is that many of these new features – animations, variables, etc – are documented as they are released. I was critical of Webkit’s decision to implement so many new features (and really, they are to act as a replacement for Flash on the iPhone more than anything else, IMHO), but at least they’ve written released technical specs for everything they’ve implemented.

By: Adam Clark

Adam Clark — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 13:35:52 +0000

Make you wonder why, as web designers, we bother some times. We work our typing fingers to the bone with the best of intentions to create something standards compliant and beautiful only to find that isn’t as fully cross browser as you’d been lead to believe.

The little hand says it’s time to rebel…