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Browser Wars 2004
J. Hobbs writes "Recent posts on David Hyatt's site describing the new technology he's working on for Dashboard, coupled with recent announcements from the newly formed WHAT-WG alliance (Apple, Mozilla, and Opera) could add up to a potentially new kind of application development and deployment that I explore in this highly speculative essay. See if you don't agree..."
It didn't? Let me check. Nope, seems to still work. All my network monitoring pages are still on my desktop.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
- A ~4Mb download
- Much faster at rendering and downloading pages (especially with user-defined speed improvements)
- Less of a memory-hog than IE (IE is only any good because of it's integration with Windows)
Mozilla is slower than Firefox, but it is a full, feature-rich browser suite.Check out Googlebar.Mozdev.Org which is a Googlebar emulation thingie that some non-Google people are doing.
If you want to be a coder speaking the truth, you could try to be informed first.
The philosophy of only coding for what browsers can handle is a noble one... and one that, as far as I know, every sane web developer has been doing as long as the field has existed... who wants to code for non-existent clients?
As for your description of that as "Just HTML", that's Just Wrong. The W3C standards are, currently, XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2.0.
The W3C has long been advocating HTML/XHTML for markup and CSS for layout/design, pretty much since that paradigm was invented (or reinvented) by them. The W3C standards have evolved a bit since you've last checked. Your assumption was:
W3C standard: HTML 4.0
Browser Proprietary Stuff: everything else
However, there's a very different story today:
W3C standards: XHTML 1.0-1.1, CSS 1.0-2.0, SVG
Used by browsers commonly, but not W3C compliant: JavaScript (or JScript), DHTML, Java (not so much anymore)... I think that's about it.
The only designers not following your advice are those coding for Internet Explorer and not for Mozilla or for W3C standards.
If you define "painless" as running the script thrugh regexps, replacing parts of it with stuff that works outside of IE, yes. Note that you probably have to do this individually for every single script.
It's possible to use some IE-specific sites in another browser via the Proxomitron, but you basically have to rewrite all of the scripts from within a regexp-based search-and-replace program, which can be quite a hassle.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Actually, Internet Explorer 6 gets CSS 1 almost completely right. I agree with the "haphazard" description of CSS 2 support though.