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The Mobile Web should just work for everyone

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Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone

#41

Post by tomjen3 »

masklinn wrote: post #26
afs35mm wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not entirely sure this is an accurate analogy. vendor prefixes solved a need. Why should we be developing to the lowest common denominator? I think we should also watch out for link-bait SEO headlines such as "Why Webkit is the New IE6 (The Trap of Vendor Prefixes)"...

> I'm not entirely sure this is an accurate analogy. vendor prefixes solved a need. No. It tried to solve two different needs: proprietary stable APIs and unstable/in-flux specs. And the abuse of the latter forced browsers to drop the use-case entirely and hide features behind flags because developers could not be trusted to act responsibly, so it definitely didn't solve that problem. > Why should we be developing to…

Why do you blame developers? The fault lies with the standards community for not standardizing much faster (at most a week after the second browser has support for that feature) and for MS for developing a browser at a glacial pace.

Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone

#42

Post by skybrian »

ntakasaki wrote: post #14

Edit: The previous title was "Windows Phone's IE starts masquerading as mobile Safari to render pages properly" Looks like the webkit prefix tags are creating the new IE6. As usual, it's the web developers fault for not updating their CSS prefixes. http://css.dzone.com/articles/why-webkit-new-ie6-trap-vendor Mozilla, Opera and Microsoft have been complaining about this and Opera had already implemented support for th…

It seems to me that vendor prefixes worked as intended. It allowed the HTML specs to be changed (for the unprefixed versions).

True, browsers need to support some pre-standardization variants for now, but this will fade. It doesn't seem like a huge burden for browsers to support older websites for a while, and it doesn't affect new websites.

Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone

#43

Post by abhinavk »

teamonkey wrote: post #32

For comparison, can someone post the user agent strings from Safari iOS7 & Android Chrome?

Chrome on KitKat: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 4.4.4; Nexus 5 Build/KVT49L) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/35.0.1916.99 Mobile Safari/537.36

Safari on iOS 7: Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 7_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.51.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0 Mobile/11A465 Safari/9537.53

Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone

#45

Post by masklinn »

tomjen3 wrote: post #37
ntakasaki wrote: post #14

Edit: The previous title was "Windows Phone's IE starts masquerading as mobile Safari to render pages properly" Looks like the webkit prefix tags are creating the new IE6. As usual, it's the web developers fault for not updating their CSS prefixes. http://css.dzone.com/articles/why-webkit-new-ie6-trap-vendor Mozilla, Opera and Microsoft have been complaining about this and Opera had already implemented support for th…

I disagree. If the tags had been standalized then we would be using them. Unfortunately the standards commity dropped the ball on this one because they are unable to act fast enough.

> Unfortunately the standards commity dropped the ball on this one because they are unable to act fast enough.

These are features which changed semantics and syntax multiple times over the course of their standardisation, it's not like standards guys were slow because they found it fun

> If the tags had been standalized then we would be using them.

Webkit browsers have all supported unprefixed box-sizing since the release of Safari Mobile 5.1 in March 2012. 2 years later… https://github.com/search?l=CSS&o=desc&q=-webkit-box-sizing&...

Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone

#47

Post by matthewmacleod »

ntakasaki wrote: post #14

Edit: The previous title was "Windows Phone's IE starts masquerading as mobile Safari to render pages properly" Looks like the webkit prefix tags are creating the new IE6. As usual, it's the web developers fault for not updating their CSS prefixes. http://css.dzone.com/articles/why-webkit-new-ie6-trap-vendor Mozilla, Opera and Microsoft have been complaining about this and Opera had already implemented support for th…

Yes. This is down to lazy, short-sighted developers, and it makes me insanely irritated.

It's ridiculously easy to make sure you include all appropriate browser-specific and generic prefixes for almost all experimental CSS features. If you use something like Compass, it's even done for you, totally transparently.

Lazy developers ruin it for everybody, again. What a surprise.

Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone

#48

Post by Smudge »

masklinn wrote: post #45
tomjen3 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. If the tags had been standalized then we would be using them. Unfortunately the standards commity dropped the ball on this one because they are unable to act fast enough.

> Unfortunately the standards commity dropped the ball on this one because they are unable to act fast enough. These are features which changed semantics and syntax multiple times over the course of their standardisation, it's not like standards guys were slow because they found it fun > If the tags had been standalized then we would be using them. Webkit browsers have all supported unprefixed box-sizing since the re…

That query means nothing. Most of those results include the non-prefixed version as well. The prefixed one is there for backwards compatibility.

Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone

#49

Post by Touche »

This is a product of over-design. Stay with me.

What happens is that designers (and product managers) stress over minute details instead of seeing the bigger picture. So developers spend an obscene amount of time fixing iOS and Galaxy specific bugs that don't degrade the overall experience but instead aren't pixel-perfect.

And as a result most other devices simply aren't tested. And instead of allowing those devices to see the site (warts and all) they resort to a whitelist of devices that can see the (QA verified) mobile site while everyone else gets either a basic mobile html site or the desktop.

Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone

#50

Post by masklinn »

tomjen3 wrote: post #41
masklinn wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not entirely sure this is an accurate analogy. vendor prefixes solved a need. No. It tried to solve two different needs: proprietary stable APIs and unstable/in-flux specs. And the abuse of the latter forced browsers to drop the use-case entirely and hide features behind flags because developers could not be trusted to act responsibly, so it definitely didn't solve that problem. > Why should we be developing to…

Why do you blame developers? The fault lies with the standards community for not standardizing much faster (at most a week after the second browser has support for that feature) and for MS for developing a browser at a glacial pace.

> Why do you blame developers?

Because the fault lies with them and no one else, no matter how in denial you are.

> The fault lies with the standards community for not standardizing much faster (at most a week after the second browser has support for that feature)

That doesn't even make sense, standards work is not "you shipped some random unspecified and mostly broken pile of shit and some other bloke was convinced to half-implement something which kinda looks similar if you squint so let's just call it standandard :shipit:"

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