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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."
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.
Don't blame Android as a platform, it actually allows non-WebKit browsers.
Why don't they use webkit themselves? Then they can spend their time, money, and energy on putting their crappy microsoft experience on top of it?
Sorry... using logic again.
Because if there is one company that really stands up for standards, it's Microsoft.
In fact, sometimes they pay millions to get them through the ISO.
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.
Man, I don't know why I even bother to visit Slashdot these days. Everything is so much misinformation that you're wiser not reading anything.
If anything, this post is like the one from yesterday about rooting the Nexus 4 phone.
Here's the deal: Some CSS properties, before becoming standard, have vendor-specific prefixes, like -moz, -webkit, -ms and -o. Sometimes their syntax is different (for example with gradients), or things like border-radius-top-left vs border-top-left-radius. As they become standardized. the prefix is dropped.
Now, MS is advising developers to include the W3C-standard property name instead of (or in addition to) the vendor-specific one.
To give a simple example, MS supports the W3C standard border-radius, but if the developer only targets -webkit-border-radius, it will work only in webkit. BTW, webkit also supports W3C border-radius, so there's currently no reason to use the prefix, at least on this property.
The funny thing is that MS pushed this type of non standard HTML by convincing web developers that it was more important to HTML to create consistant application interfaces rather than flexible content delivery and sales interface technology. So they pushed the idea of fixed screen sizes, fixed elements, and the like that only IE could, at the time, deliver. CSS and HTML5 depreciated the IE technology, but the damage was done. A generation of web developers were trained to look at web pages as fixed entities, not flexible markups. Even today I have to use some web pages that will only on IE because MS has convinced the MBAs that this is the most efficient way to do things.
So now we are at a place where Webkit and Gecko rule the world. Designers are writing web pages to work well on Chrome, Firefox, and Android, which fortunately for apple will make it work on Mac and iOS as well. MS, being the entitled rich kid, is whining that consumers are ignoring IE. Of course IE is being ignored. It is doesn't run on anything that consumers choose to use. The only people who use IE are corporate types that are forced to use IE. If I have a new social app, am I going to cate that it does not run on IE. No, I am going to care that it does not run Android. If MS wants it to run on IE, they have the resources to add the functionality to IE. Otherwise who cares?
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I wish people would stop offering the "well Microsoft used to do this so who are they to complain" excuse. Not only is the internet a different place, but so is Microsoft. They tried very hard to become as standards-compliant as they are now, and it took the risk of breaking existing websites along the way, despite the compatibility mode they offered. But the fact is, they made that decision. I still don't care about using IE, but I still give credit where credit is due.
Where the problem lies is mostly with the W3C. This is who we should be blaming. This is 2012, and all that ever happens with these people is bickering and squabbling, while the web still stagnates with a technology level of five years ago, and couldn't even decide on a standard for something as basic as rounded corners. This is the Achilles' Heel of the free software world, where everything is treated far too much as a democracy, so every nerd with an over-inflated ego has an idea for how something should be done and they're absolutely certain that theirs is the best way to do it. It not only results in the dozens and dozens of forks of major pieces of software in the free software community, but also results in any kind of standards decisions being delayed for literally years while everyone acts like babies instead of ratifying something already.
I can remember almost ten years ago when I was developing a very graphics-oriented website, and part of what I was being asked to do was to rotate a section of the page by 90 degrees. Except the content on this area was dynamic, containing an avatar and the user's name and stuff. There was no web standard for doing something like this at all, and my only option was going to be using Flash. But since Flash was prone to not line up perfectly among every browser (and I needed pixel-perfect alignment), not to mention was overkill for what I needed, even that was a problem. So eventually, after looking at our statistics, a good 98+% of the users used IE. The rest was Opera or Safari. So I made the decision to implement IE's proprietary DirectX filter extension, which allowed rotation of any HTML object in the page, and would apply this to any content normally inside of this object as well. The resulting effect was excellent.
Over time, I wasn't entirely satisfied with this single-browser solution (which had something to do with the fact that I'd switched to Opera myself!). But web technology still never caught up. So my way around this was to generate this section of the website on the server itself, using Perl and the GD library. I cached the resulting image for every user, only regenerating it when they changed their icon or any of their information. I was able to recreate the original DirectX filter version with 99% accuracy this way. But this was all only because our web host had been kind enough to install GD for me to begin with, since this was before we were running our own server.
The point of this story is, the ability to rotate components in a DOM tree has only recently become possible in HTML5. And HTML5 is still unfinished! Expect to see plenty more browser-dependent extensions over the decade, just like what happened last decade, all because the organization we rely on to give us these standards is dragging its heels and arguing every detail along the way.
And webkit prefix is supposed to be either not yet ratified in the standard features
But for how many years should one reasonably expect web developers to include -webkit-, -moz-, -o-, and -ms- in all their pages while they wait for W3C to operate at its glacial pace? Some browser makers have even threatened to implement other browsers' prefixes (compatibly, I hope).