5 ms·

Aren't all of those properties/methods standardized to query something about the document that require it to be laid out? What do you think the standards are la

by AgentME 11y ago

Aren't all of those properties/methods standardized to query something about the document that require it to be laid out? What do you think the standards are lacking here?

josteink 11y ago
It may have been some of a gut-reaction on my part (and I'm willing to admit that), but my main gripe with documents like this is that at the moment tons of web-developers are targeting Chrome only. When something breaks in Firefox, Safari, Vivaldi, Edge or other browsers (because obviously it was never tested outside Chrome) their answer is usually "Just use Chrome". This is now not only happening at amateur-hour shows and quick Github POCs, but also at official products from big names like Google. Basically "This website best viewed in Chrome". Haven't we already been there? We saw how that worked out, didn't we? That sort of attitude is not healthy for the web at large, and documents like this will (IMO) further entrench that attitude, rather than the opposite.
- ultim8k 11y ago
  Developers (and me as one of them) seek their sanity. They try to achieve what they've been asked to, by following the specs. There are some browsers that are always up-to-date with the specs, and there are other browsers that still have 5 year old bugs to fix.
  - josteink 11y ago
    If those browsers are still in popular use, and you call yourself a professional web developer, you test and ensure things work in those old and terrible browsers too though. But like I said, there are plenty of amateur-hour gigs following your play-book. You decide which group you want to identify with. For me part, I know which I represent. And thus for a small rant: On a side note, I love how web-developers these days have the nerve to tell people how hard their job is because they have to support several browsers. Cry me a river. Nobody's job has ever been easier than yours. Do you have to deal with messages not getting through in a message pump when threads are involved? Do you have to deal with how GPU accelerated graphics frameworks magically sometimes not showing windows when run in a Citrix TS, but with faulty Intel GPU drivers on the server? Have you ever tried to figure out why your code isn't getting the correct registry-entries, which you can see is there in a mixed 32-64 registry mess? Why that setting a configured was never shell-expanded, causing your script to break 3 layers in? Have you ever tried to debug why the file you just released a handle for is still locked, by yourself? Etc etc. These things a million times every day. Web-developers have it so easy peasy as no other programmer in the history of programmers. I'll admit that's an opinion, but I'm pretty sure it closer to a fact. Signed someone who has delivered cross-platform products, on-premise software across several versions and decades, with demands that nothing should ever be broken no matter what.
    - ultim8k 11y ago
      And yes my job is 'easy'. And I personally try to always serve legacy browsers too. And yes I will always complain until those browsers will finally fix their bugs and implement what the specs say.
    - andybak 11y ago
      > If those browsers are still in popular use, and you call yourself a professional web developer, you test and ensure things work in those old and terrible browsers too though. That's not my decision to make as it impacts production costs. The person paying the bills should be the one that makes the decision and my job is to inform him of the probable costs and provide statistics so he can measure the cost vs benefit for his intended audience.
    - Klathmon 11y ago
      I'm so tired of hearing this. Just because web developers need to solve different problems doesn't mean it's easy. This kind of crab mentality of "you aren't a real developer until you are miserable like me" is really getting old and it only serves to make the whole industry look standoffish and bad. Yes, some of the work I do on the web is easy, but so is the view components of any other system. The time spent bit twiddling to try and get a little more performance out of a browser to be able to render a game at 60 FPS or spending time understanding what each browser compiles my JS to under the hood (after it was "transpiled" [i hate that word] from another JS dialect) so that I can figure out why what should be a simple copy is taking so fucking long is just as difficult as some of the shit you have to deal with. Stop trying to make it into a contest.
  - ultim8k 11y ago
    That applies when you build websites. But when you build web apps, you care more about providing the best optimal experience for the up-to-date browsers and if you have enough time you can provide a graceful degradation for the old browsers. But most of the time it depends on what you've been ordered to build and which users you want to focus.
    - LoSboccacc 11y ago
      Keyword: enough time. Spent two day working around a firefox outline bug only to have it break on mobile safary because their absolute positioning of pseudo elements is relative to the parent and not the element. Browsers are making my day to day work miserable. I wish O could target a reference css3 platform and browser specific bugs be damned.
- gopowerranger 11y ago
  >at the moment tons of web-developers are targeting Chrome only. I'm a web developer and, in my 11 years of doing this, the only people I've ever seen do that are those experimenting with a new feature that only works in Chrome or rank amateurs. Knowledgeable web developers write code to standards, not browsers.
  - kuschku 11y ago
    WhatsApp Web? Google Inbox? Very good examples that were unnecessarily "only works in Chrome". Changing your User agent also allowed you to use both in Firefox.
    - Moter8 11y ago
      Both of these did not allow other browser when they were released, today both work fine on FF. Details on why Inbox wasn't available at first are available in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8606879 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8606879
      - kuschku 11y ago
        And still, for a few months two recent web products were limited to one browser, which is used by a minority, and is in many countries not even the largest minority.
      - gsnedders 11y ago
        And still rely on UA hackery in Opera, which given in principle it relies on the same version of the Chromium Content API as the current Chrome release, it's fairly obvious it's a business decision and not a technical one.
  - gsnedders 11y ago
    > Knowledgeable web developers write code to standards, not browsers. Really? I certainly don't try and work out how the spec says the document should render — I trust if browsers interoperably render the document the same, that's what the spec says. And I'm not someone scared of specs, having contributed to them for years and worked on browsers for years.

by AgentME 11y ago

Aren't all of those properties/methods standardized to query something about the document that require it to be laid out? What do you think the standards are lacking here?

josteink 11y ago

It may have been some of a gut-reaction on my part (and I'm willing to admit that), but my main gripe with documents like this is that at the moment tons of web-developers are targeting Chrome only. When something breaks in Firefox, Safari, Vivaldi, Edge or other browsers (because obviously it was never tested outside Chrome) their answer is usually "Just use Chrome". This is now not only happening at amateur-hour shows and quick Github POCs, but also at official products from big names like Google. Basically "This website best viewed in Chrome". Haven't we already been there? We saw how that worked out, didn't we? That sort of attitude is not healthy for the web at large, and documents like this will (IMO) further entrench that attitude, rather than the opposite.

ultim8k 11y ago
Developers (and me as one of them) seek their sanity. They try to achieve what they've been asked to, by following the specs. There are some browsers that are always up-to-date with the specs, and there are other browsers that still have 5 year old bugs to fix.
- josteink 11y ago
  If those browsers are still in popular use, and you call yourself a professional web developer, you test and ensure things work in those old and terrible browsers too though. But like I said, there are plenty of amateur-hour gigs following your play-book. You decide which group you want to identify with. For me part, I know which I represent. And thus for a small rant: On a side note, I love how web-developers these days have the nerve to tell people how hard their job is because they have to support several browsers. Cry me a river. Nobody's job has ever been easier than yours. Do you have to deal with messages not getting through in a message pump when threads are involved? Do you have to deal with how GPU accelerated graphics frameworks magically sometimes not showing windows when run in a Citrix TS, but with faulty Intel GPU drivers on the server? Have you ever tried to figure out why your code isn't getting the correct registry-entries, which you can see is there in a mixed 32-64 registry mess? Why that setting a configured was never shell-expanded, causing your script to break 3 layers in? Have you ever tried to debug why the file you just released a handle for is still locked, by yourself? Etc etc. These things a million times every day. Web-developers have it so easy peasy as no other programmer in the history of programmers. I'll admit that's an opinion, but I'm pretty sure it closer to a fact. Signed someone who has delivered cross-platform products, on-premise software across several versions and decades, with demands that nothing should ever be broken no matter what.
  - ultim8k 11y ago
    And yes my job is 'easy'. And I personally try to always serve legacy browsers too. And yes I will always complain until those browsers will finally fix their bugs and implement what the specs say.
  - andybak 11y ago
    > If those browsers are still in popular use, and you call yourself a professional web developer, you test and ensure things work in those old and terrible browsers too though. That's not my decision to make as it impacts production costs. The person paying the bills should be the one that makes the decision and my job is to inform him of the probable costs and provide statistics so he can measure the cost vs benefit for his intended audience.
  - Klathmon 11y ago
    I'm so tired of hearing this. Just because web developers need to solve different problems doesn't mean it's easy. This kind of crab mentality of "you aren't a real developer until you are miserable like me" is really getting old and it only serves to make the whole industry look standoffish and bad. Yes, some of the work I do on the web is easy, but so is the view components of any other system. The time spent bit twiddling to try and get a little more performance out of a browser to be able to render a game at 60 FPS or spending time understanding what each browser compiles my JS to under the hood (after it was "transpiled" [i hate that word] from another JS dialect) so that I can figure out why what should be a simple copy is taking so fucking long is just as difficult as some of the shit you have to deal with. Stop trying to make it into a contest.
- ultim8k 11y ago
  That applies when you build websites. But when you build web apps, you care more about providing the best optimal experience for the up-to-date browsers and if you have enough time you can provide a graceful degradation for the old browsers. But most of the time it depends on what you've been ordered to build and which users you want to focus.
  - LoSboccacc 11y ago
    Keyword: enough time. Spent two day working around a firefox outline bug only to have it break on mobile safary because their absolute positioning of pseudo elements is relative to the parent and not the element. Browsers are making my day to day work miserable. I wish O could target a reference css3 platform and browser specific bugs be damned.
gopowerranger 11y ago
>at the moment tons of web-developers are targeting Chrome only. I'm a web developer and, in my 11 years of doing this, the only people I've ever seen do that are those experimenting with a new feature that only works in Chrome or rank amateurs. Knowledgeable web developers write code to standards, not browsers.
- kuschku 11y ago
  WhatsApp Web? Google Inbox? Very good examples that were unnecessarily "only works in Chrome". Changing your User agent also allowed you to use both in Firefox.
  - Moter8 11y ago
    Both of these did not allow other browser when they were released, today both work fine on FF. Details on why Inbox wasn't available at first are available in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8606879 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8606879
    - kuschku 11y ago
      And still, for a few months two recent web products were limited to one browser, which is used by a minority, and is in many countries not even the largest minority.
    - gsnedders 11y ago
      And still rely on UA hackery in Opera, which given in principle it relies on the same version of the Chromium Content API as the current Chrome release, it's fairly obvious it's a business decision and not a technical one.
- gsnedders 11y ago
  > Knowledgeable web developers write code to standards, not browsers. Really? I certainly don't try and work out how the spec says the document should render — I trust if browsers interoperably render the document the same, that's what the spec says. And I'm not someone scared of specs, having contributed to them for years and worked on browsers for years.