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The Open Web Needs You Now

glazman.org

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Re: The Open Web Needs You Now

#41

Post by nroach »

kevingadd wrote: post #24

This problem seems to indicate a tremendous failure on the W3C's part to anticipate the actual consequences of vendor prefixes, or if they actually anticipated them, a failure to act. Despite the fact that Quirks Mode is not identical, it is a similar enough case (And one that should be familiar to every browser vendor) that ignoring its example when considering vendor prefixes suggests either willful ignorance or an…

I agree to an extent. But, the webkit prefix situation is not the same as the IE problem. During IE's heyday, sites were tailored specifically to that browser, but due to IP and technical lock-in, other browsers were unable to implement the IE-specific features. (See ActiveX).

Here, the problem isn't one of capability. The other browsers can (and have indicated that they will) implement the webkit syntax and feature set.

The W3C is simply clinging to a failed spec "because its the spec". As was made clear in the OP's plea, the W3C needs browsers to observe their specs to remain relevant and avoid circumvention.

If the webkit extensions aren't technically or legally barred from implementation, there's no reason that other browsers shouldn't simply adapt. Aside from the W3C's own self-interest, the only "problem" here is that the market is dictating the solution, instead of a panel of self-professed governors.

Re: The Open Web Needs You Now

#42

Post by cdmoyer »

hoppipolla wrote: post #16
alexchamberlain wrote: post #4

I completely agree that Firefox must not accept -webkit-* prefixes. A better approach would be to contact the sites in question and socially bombard them into changing.

Long experience of contacting sites suggests that it is, at best, of limited effectiveness. At Opera we have a not-insubstantial team dedicated to developer outreach who frequently contact sites that are broken in Opera and give them help to get stuff working again. But the approach doesn't scale; we can only contact so many broken sites and we can only get so much traction being proactive and asking people not to de…

I really wonder how much end users care. If you exclude end users that are, say, either reading hacker news or paying people to create web sites.

Of my biased selection of wife, father, mother, brother, I will frequently see them browsing in IE or FireFox and seeing terrible, terrible pages and not really caring or even noticing. They don't think, "huh, I bet this site would look better with a border-radius... didn't it have one in chrome?"

Edit: To clarify. I think I'm just questioning whether this is bad for these users. I mean, if they don't perceive the issue, is it bad? They are getting a lesser experience, but does that matter?

Re: The Open Web Needs You Now

#43

Post by Flenser »

Surely once the feature is standardised webkit stops supporting the feature with the -webkit- prefix so sites will be forced to update their css. Or does webkit continue to support the features with the -webkit- prefix even when they'll work without it? If it's that latter then surely all that's needed is for webkit—or projects using webkit—to agree to drop support for the -webkit- prefix once it's been standardised and this will stop being a problem.

Re: The Open Web Needs You Now

#44

Post by tomjen3 »

Can we excempt -ms prefixes from this?

Because we really, really need ms to decouple their browser from their OS and institute forced upgrades ala Chrome so that we never again have to deal with outdated shit.

Seems fair that we ban their browser until they play along.

Re: The Open Web Needs You Now

#45

Post by tomjen3 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #36

Funny, for my own reasons I uninstalled Chrome and switched to IE9 on my main computer. Although IE9 supports standards well on paper, it's shocking how many sites aimed at "webby" sorts of people don't work on IE9.

Quite frankly that is because IE is a browser that we have to live with users using. If it was a bit more realistic I wouldn't support IE at all (no matter the version), I would even take steps to break my site in IE since IE is the last browser which has any meaningful marketshare and which is not automatically updated to the latest version.

So if you use IE when you are not forced to, you drag the rest of us down. And that frankly isn't cool.

Re: The Open Web Needs You Now

#46

Post by sp332 »

alexchamberlain wrote: post #4

I completely agree that Firefox must not accept -webkit-* prefixes. A better approach would be to contact the sites in question and socially bombard them into changing.

This was discussed already. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3561950

glazou: A long time ago, Mozilla had an Evangelism team that would call up the website owners and ask them to change.

Florian: Opera has a large and active one, but it does not scale. ...

Florian, Sylvain: Evangelism has failed.

glazou: Have you tried pinging the WASP about that? Other activists of web standards?

sylvaing: If MS can't scale to handle this, you think WASP can?

tantek: Opposite is happening right now. Web standards activists are teaching people to use -webkit-

Re: The Open Web Needs You Now

#47

Post by tomjen3 »

hoppipolla wrote: post #16
alexchamberlain wrote: post #4

I completely agree that Firefox must not accept -webkit-* prefixes. A better approach would be to contact the sites in question and socially bombard them into changing.

Long experience of contacting sites suggests that it is, at best, of limited effectiveness. At Opera we have a not-insubstantial team dedicated to developer outreach who frequently contact sites that are broken in Opera and give them help to get stuff working again. But the approach doesn't scale; we can only contact so many broken sites and we can only get so much traction being proactive and asking people not to de…

Honestly I don't really get the existence of Opera. Not when both Firefox and Chrome are free and don't suffer from the issues you mentioned.

This may be related to why I don't really care about the few users who use Opera -- it is just not worth it.

Re: The Open Web Needs You Now

#48

Post by tomjen3 »

DanBC wrote: post #15
erichocean wrote: post #10

> I am also calling Apple and Google to remove support for the "experimental" versions of a property when the final one is implemented and shipped. That is a terrible, terrible idea and will never (and should never) happen. Sure, add support for the un-prefixed property. But don't break existing sites. That mentality is what gave us XHTML, and we all know how that went. I guess it is the IE6 days all over again after…

People using experimental features should be prepared for those features to break. Hopefully this allows people to be creative and inventive on their personal sites, without pushing experimental features through to big production websites. Don't forget that those sites are already, by design of the owners, broken for any non-webkit browser.

Experimental? Gradients are almost certainly not experimental -- they are even supported in IE 8 (though through a non-standard way, thanks MS) -- nor should scaling be experimental (there is nothing experimental about it).

Re: The Open Web Needs You Now

#49

Post by tomjen3 »

gcp wrote: post #14
Toshio wrote: post #12

I agree with helping Mozilla and Opera, because they are good citizens of the open web community. But I disagree with helping Microsoft. We should make sure the IE-nazism episode never happens again by forcing them to implement one of -webkit- -moz- -o-.

Either the web is open for everyone (including Microsoft), or it's closed. There is no middle ground here.

Then it is closed. Whatever.

And I am all for letting MS back in, at such time that they:

1) Decouple their browser updates from their OS. 2) Make it automatically update to the latest version, just like Firefox and Chrome. It should be possible to turn this of, just like Chrome, but not on a group basis.

Re: The Open Web Needs You Now

#50

Post by robin_reala »

_urga wrote: post #35
samth wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

6 weeks is exactly the same update cycle as Chrome, and much faster than Safari (or Mobile Safari, or the Android Browser).

You're right. 6 week release cycles for Firefox are as of April 2011, Chrome has been at it for longer. There are problems with the release cycle for Firefox, it's not as seamless, and the numbers are not as good: http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/12/06/comparing-chrome-and-fir... In terms of what is delivered in each update, Chrome is ahead. For instance, IndexedDB in Firefox at one stage was an order of magnitude slowe…

Mozilla know that their updates aren’t as seamless and have been working hard to make them so. Completely silent updates land in Firefox 12 I believe (3 months time).
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