Microsoft Complains That WebKit Breaks Web Standards

Billly Gates writes "In a bizarre, yet funny and ironic move, Microsoft warned web developers that using WebKit stagnates open standards and innovation on the Web. According to the call to action in its Windows Phone Developer Blog, Microsoft is especially concerned about the mobile market, where many mobile sites only work with Android or iOS with WebKit-specific extensions. Their examples include W3C code such as radius-border, which is being written as -WebKit-radius-border instead on websites. In the mobile market WebKit has a 90% marketshare, while website masters feel it is not worth the development effort to test against browsers such as IE. Microsoft's solution to the problem of course is to use IE 10 for standard compliance and not use the proprietary (yet open source) WebKit."

Comments

Microsoft is right

[GoogleFan1]

WebKit is doing exactly what Microsoft accuses it of. They are developing their own extensions and putting them out as webkit- prefixed. Of course Microsoft shouldn't try to implement these non-standard extensions but use the standard ones. This is why I see nothing "funny" or "bizarre" about it, other than for the fact that WebKit is now doing exactly what everyone hated IE doing years ago.

Re:Microsoft is right

[SJHillman]

The funny and bizarre part is that this is exactly what Microsoft did for a long, long time. It's only with IE7 they made the first steps towards standardization (thus why so many apps are stuck using IE6) and later versions of IE have made standardization even more of a priority. It's toeing a thin line of hypocrisy and the only thing keeping them from crossing is it the fact that they stopped doing exactly this just a few years ago.

Re:Microsoft is right

[dingen]

The webkit-prefixes is exactly what Microsoft never did. By prefixing attributes, it is clear for everyone these are platform-specific features in need of a cross-platform solution. Microsoft instead always tried to obfuscate what is standard and what is IE-specific by interpreting standard code intentionally different and adding their own attributes and elements without providing any clues to developers that this stuff was not actually part of any standard specification.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with prefixing attributes. Mozilla does it, Opera does it, Webkit does it and it makes it perfectly clear to the world which features are standard and which features are not.

Re:Microsoft is right

[erroneus]

No, this isn't exactly what Microsoft did. The meaning and purpose behind putting "webkit-" in there is to prevent it from being misunderstood as a standard.

Unfortunately, as developers did with Microsoft, was that they deployed techniques which were not standards. In Microsoft's case, they did not announce in any way that "this is Microsoft only." In the case of Webkit, it's pretty darned obvious.

Webkit did what they could while also allowing developers to test and play with the added features. It is the developers who broke the rules by using the Webkit extensions.

Of course, the irony is delicious. This is a reversal of something which Microsoft took heavy advantage for many, many years. It doesn't make it right, but the blame isn't on Webkit for implementing those things. It did, in my opinion, the best thing to ensure that developers were aware that the things they were doing were webkit specific. Additionally, if there were any web development tools which deployed webkit specific functions without informing the developer in some way (such as "enable webkit specific functions? (y/n)") then they share some of the blame.

Microsoft did the same, but worse. Webkit remains obvious and open. Once a feature becomes a standard, the webkit- is removed and simply given the name. I have seen this already. But the process is really, really slow. And that's a big part of the problem. Developers don't want really really slow adoption of standards. They want to make the best, most eye-popping and exciting pages for their clients and for users to experience.

Open Platform

[Nerdfest]

Don't blame Android as a platform, it actually allows non-WebKit browsers.

Biased much?

[Redbaran]

It shouldn't come as a surprise that a summary written by "Billy Gates" would be this slanted... I read the MS blog and I didn't see anything that ruffled my feathers. Don't get me wrong, I still have a bad taste in my mouth from the IE6 days, but all the blog post is doing is saying is "don't make your site webkit specific". This is good advice not because of IE, but because there are still other browsers out there such as Opera Mobile.

In fact, MS blog post specifically states: "Now, it’s very easy to adapt a WebKit-optimized site to also support IE10." See that keyword I emphasized, it means they aren't telling people to abandon webkit. The examples they provide back that up as they leave webkit support in place and add either the non-prefixed standards compliant property or when that's not available, add the IE specific property alongside the webkit one.

As a side note, I take a site like this much less seriously when it stoops to the same level of bipartisan drivel and mud slinging that we all had to endure for the last six months with the US elections.