The Ninja Space Goat wrote:Boy am I glad somebody finally did something about that. I feel sorry for the poor web developer pioneers who had to deal with this at its worse. When I first started web design/development, it was still pretty prevelant, but I never had it THAT bad.
I'm sad to say they haven't. The latest Opera and Firefox releases include WhatWG concepts, and even browser-specific technologies that aren't standardized by ANY standards body.
I don't want to go all chicken little, and say that means the world is ending. SOME innovation beyond the standards body is arguably a good thing. In both cases I'm thinking of, I actually think they are positive - not negative - things. That said, I don't want to give the impression that browser-specific coding has ended. Far from it. But yes, we are worlds better off now than we were a few years ago.
Astions wrote:Someone should just make an open source plugin that renders every page the same way that can be installed in any browswer on any os. I'm surprised it hasn't been done before.
"The same way" has been done. Thats what both Opera and Firefox offer - a consistent, any-os rendering engine. Across multiple browsers is a very different challenge. Keep in mind that *no* browser on the market today fully supports all the existing published standards. Heck, none of them even fully support the 5-year old standards!
Programming a rendering engine that is consistent, and rational, and functional is incredibly difficult. It has taken over a decade for the majority of browsers to reach the levels they have. Going beyond that, to turn it into a cross-platform PLUGIN would be even MORE challenging.
Astions wrote:Something like a page that says, hey I am standards compliant html & css, but don't use the browser to render me, use x plugin instead. If the plugin isn't installed it could fall back to the quirky rendering engine of the browser.
Quite honestly, the problem really isn't that bad with truly standards compliant html & css, except on Internet Explorer. Most standard code goes into standards mode, which most of the browsers render very consistently. With IE7, the range of code --- in standards mode --- that is rendered differently is very small.
Quirks mode, on the other hand, is a complete nightmare.
Everah wrote:I will say at this point, thought, that I am seriously leaning toward strict compliance regardless of browser capability. If Opera, Netscape and Mozilla can put out updates to their browsers every few months, why can't Microsoft?
I don't hesitate to take pretty much ANY opportunity to criticize Microsoft on a huge variety of issues, because I feel they've earned every bit of it.
In this case, I feel it is doubly true. Their actions imply that after they killed off the competition (Netscape), and built a "functional" browser (IE6), they felt no need for significant changes that
would reduce their market lock-in. Even if users demanded it.
Once their market share started to decline below 95%, then they added their very best developers, in an incredibly short period of time, and revamped the engine.
Notice that the majority of the fixes to IE7 are to the most common rendering engine problems. Many of which
gave a vendor advantage to Microsoft. For example, png rendering in IE6 is a mess, and to get full support for png's transparencies,
you had to use an ActiveX object. By not fixing that bug - and it was a bug - they were able to increase the number of cutting edge sites that required ActiveX objects. That in turn meant more people leaving ActiveX enabled, which meant in turn more users that you could code IIS-driven, ActiveX heavy sites FOR.
In IE7, they fixed the rendering bug for PNG's, and noted it as a bug. This is a clear statement, in my opinion.
Thankfully, its not a negative statement. Its very positive. It says that Microsoft is putting more importance on standards compliance than vendor advantage, and is doing
the right thing. I sincerely hope that trend continues beyond IE7. At the least, I would love an IE that didn't choke on the correct mime type for XML.
Until then, I'll give IE the tweaks it needs in my CSS and HTML to work around their well-known flaws, to make sure my message reaches the largest possible market.
[[EDIT: Fixed quote authors - SORRY!]]