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Most of these are just clever CSS hacks. There is a website collecting these kind of experiments since the early '00: http://www.cssplay.co.uk/ http://www.csspl

Most of these are just clever CSS hacks. There is a website collecting these kind of experiments since the early '00: http://www.cssplay.co.uk/ http://www.cssplay.co.uk/ There was a time when separation of concerns and the "Rule of Least Power"[0] where the foundation principles of web development. Today you have preprocessors, postprocessors, transpilers, content and style in JavaScript, behavior in CSS. Very powerful tools that can easily lead to unnecessary complexity. On the other hand, somehow W3C failed to turn these principles into a truly interoperable and semantic web. Ah! Also, nobody cares about unobtrusive JavaScript anymore. [0]: https://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/leastPower.html https://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/leastPower.html

harryf 10y ago
Hmmm... .accordion .content { padding:0 10px; overflow:hidden; border:1px solid #fff; -webkit-transition: all .5s ease-out; -moz-transition: all .5s ease-out; } -webkit-transition, -moz-transition... it's like we're at 180 degrees to where the web was in the days of IE4-6
- ricardobeat 10y ago
  transition has been standardized and available in all browsers for years already, that is only necessary as fallback for very old browsers.
  - talmand 10y ago
    The only reason I use the webkit prefix on transition is for Android, otherwise I would say it isn't necessary at all.
    - ry_ry 10y ago
      Still a suprising number of old safari builds out in the wild, from a very quick look at our GA. Largely elderly iphones I assume? Either way, I'm reticent to pull the WebKit prefixes from our mixins for now. I wonder if my employers would be interested in releasing (& aggregating with other relatively large sites) our browser usage stats to create a categorised set of current 'real world' stats?
- clarry 10y ago
  Remember when Good Developers would hate on framesets because they break the back button and linking and everything? Now it's totally OK to break all that with AJAX and "text-as-apps"... I much prefer the days of the old web.
  - nkassis 10y ago
    Days of the old web where flash was pervasive and best viewed in [IE6|Netscape|Mosaic|...] pages were everywhere. Every generation of the web has had really crappy devs building bad experiences. The current generation is not making anything worse than it's predecessor.
    - JustSomeNobody 10y ago
      >... is not making anything worse... That's a pretty low bar.
      - jdmichal 10y ago
        Maybe, but it's an accurate assessment to someone pining for the "old days"...
    - TorKlingberg 10y ago
      "best viewed in Chrome" is getting annoyingly common.
      - inanutshellus 10y ago
        Bank Of America recently told me it only supported Safari and Chrome on MacOS... But... supported Firefox on Windows. Whaaaa....
        clarry 10y ago
        And my bank keeps constantly nagging me that my browser (Firefox LTS) is no longer supported and that I must update immediately.
- iamtyce 10y ago
  Autoprefixer and prefixfree allow for writing 1x declaration and as support improves over time the prefixes are automatically dropped from your build.
- zeveb 10y ago
  I think we learned from X- headers and x- media types that vendor prefixes are a mistake: inevitably one must support vendor-prefixed keys forever. That's why that practice is no longer recommended: just use the right key, and specify it properly so others may support it as well.
- nostrademons 10y ago
  The browser prefixes haven't been necessary on transition for almost 3 years now: http://caniuse.com/#search=css%20transition http://caniuse.com/#search=css%20transition This is just a webdev with old habits that isn't staying current.
toomanythings3 10y ago
The W3C's job is to standardize implementations. Most standards bodies do not invent on their own. In any case, a standards body will generate the fundamentals allowing the ability to piece together components to create what a developer wants. No standards body is able to come up with every desire of every developer.
- achairapart 10y ago
  The point is: Usually, you must know the rules to break them. In this particular context, looks like the original rules are fading away. No rules = Anarchy.
  - nilved 10y ago
    Nitpick, but anarchism is not the lack of rules, it's the lack of rulers.
    - achairapart 10y ago
      My bad, thanks for pointing it out.
    - Piskvorrr 10y ago
      That's not really a nitpick: in case of the Internet, it's the main modus operandi - with various warlords carving out a temporary fiefdom here and there (remember the Browser Wars, when IE had 90%? Brace yourselves, we're headed for a re-run with Chrome), but no actual rulers or enforcement.
cptskippy 10y ago
> Ah! Also, nobody cares about unobtrusive JavaScript anymore. I do. I also care about graceful degradation. There are certain times (e.g. Web Apps like Gmail) where graceful degradation is almost impossible and unobtrusive JavaScript would be silly but those are the exception. Most sites on the web are just content and there's no reason to have excessive JavaScript or any reason why the page can't be perfectly functional without it.
- the_gastropod 10y ago
  I often hear rationalizations about how x couldn't be built with graceful degradation in mind. There certainly are _some_ examples (games, for example). But GMail doesn't strike me as a particularly compelling example. GMail is also _just content_. The fancy ajax interactions, though nice, are hardly required for an email client.
  - afarrell 10y ago
    I think doing what they do, having a less-fancy separate client, is less complex.
  - sanderjd 10y ago
    This is a-historical by my memory - the entire reason Gmail became so successful was that its use of "fancy ajax interactions" made it shockingly nicer to use than any of its competitors at the time. I think if one of your main selling points is interactivity afforded by javascript, then it is unlikely to have much return on investment to accommodate users who don't want that. But for sure people should be thinking harder about what their selling points really are - the market for "it's better because of ajax!" is probably tapped out.
    - FroshKiller 10y ago
      AJAX isn't why Gmail became successful. What set Gmail apart from its competitors was the huge amount of initial storage you got (1 GB for free at a time when Hotmail offered less than 10 MB for free), a higher maximum attachment size (25 MB compared to the webmail standard 10 MB), Google search, and conversation view. All of which, by the way, worked with the AJAX-free basic HTML view.
adrusi 10y ago
The semantic web failed in large part because browsers didn't implement XSL, and so the average web developer never learned about the idea of sending structured data to the client as XML and using XSLT to instruct browsers to render the data as XHTML. If these specs hadn't been released in the middle of Internet-Explorer-monopoly-induced-browser-stagnation then they wouldn't have been dismissed as failures by the time browser competition increased and standards started to be honored. I'm not sure that the semantic web would succeed even if it were a new idea today. HTML5 was popular because it gave web developers tons of shiny toys and got them excited to use it. XHTML was conceptually beautiful but it hardly enabled any user-visible improvements over HTML4, so only the philosophically-minded web developers gave a fuck.

harryf 10y ago

Hmmm... .accordion .content { padding:0 10px; overflow:hidden; border:1px solid #fff; -webkit-transition: all .5s ease-out; -moz-transition: all .5s ease-out; } -webkit-transition, -moz-transition... it's like we're at 180 degrees to where the web was in the days of IE4-6

ricardobeat 10y ago
transition has been standardized and available in all browsers for years already, that is only necessary as fallback for very old browsers.
- talmand 10y ago
  The only reason I use the webkit prefix on transition is for Android, otherwise I would say it isn't necessary at all.
  - ry_ry 10y ago
    Still a suprising number of old safari builds out in the wild, from a very quick look at our GA. Largely elderly iphones I assume? Either way, I'm reticent to pull the WebKit prefixes from our mixins for now. I wonder if my employers would be interested in releasing (& aggregating with other relatively large sites) our browser usage stats to create a categorised set of current 'real world' stats?
clarry 10y ago
Remember when Good Developers would hate on framesets because they break the back button and linking and everything? Now it's totally OK to break all that with AJAX and "text-as-apps"... I much prefer the days of the old web.
- nkassis 10y ago
  Days of the old web where flash was pervasive and best viewed in [IE6|Netscape|Mosaic|...] pages were everywhere. Every generation of the web has had really crappy devs building bad experiences. The current generation is not making anything worse than it's predecessor.
  - JustSomeNobody 10y ago
    >... is not making anything worse... That's a pretty low bar.
    - jdmichal 10y ago
      Maybe, but it's an accurate assessment to someone pining for the "old days"...
  - TorKlingberg 10y ago
    "best viewed in Chrome" is getting annoyingly common.
    - inanutshellus 10y ago
      Bank Of America recently told me it only supported Safari and Chrome on MacOS... But... supported Firefox on Windows. Whaaaa....
      - clarry 10y ago
        And my bank keeps constantly nagging me that my browser (Firefox LTS) is no longer supported and that I must update immediately.
iamtyce 10y ago
Autoprefixer and prefixfree allow for writing 1x declaration and as support improves over time the prefixes are automatically dropped from your build.
zeveb 10y ago
I think we learned from X- headers and x- media types that vendor prefixes are a mistake: inevitably one must support vendor-prefixed keys forever. That's why that practice is no longer recommended: just use the right key, and specify it properly so others may support it as well.
nostrademons 10y ago
The browser prefixes haven't been necessary on transition for almost 3 years now: http://caniuse.com/#search=css%20transition http://caniuse.com/#search=css%20transition This is just a webdev with old habits that isn't staying current.

toomanythings3 10y ago

The W3C's job is to standardize implementations. Most standards bodies do not invent on their own. In any case, a standards body will generate the fundamentals allowing the ability to piece together components to create what a developer wants. No standards body is able to come up with every desire of every developer.

achairapart 10y ago
The point is: Usually, you must know the rules to break them. In this particular context, looks like the original rules are fading away. No rules = Anarchy.
- nilved 10y ago
  Nitpick, but anarchism is not the lack of rules, it's the lack of rulers.
  - achairapart 10y ago
    My bad, thanks for pointing it out.
  - Piskvorrr 10y ago
    That's not really a nitpick: in case of the Internet, it's the main modus operandi - with various warlords carving out a temporary fiefdom here and there (remember the Browser Wars, when IE had 90%? Brace yourselves, we're headed for a re-run with Chrome), but no actual rulers or enforcement.

cptskippy 10y ago

> Ah! Also, nobody cares about unobtrusive JavaScript anymore. I do. I also care about graceful degradation. There are certain times (e.g. Web Apps like Gmail) where graceful degradation is almost impossible and unobtrusive JavaScript would be silly but those are the exception. Most sites on the web are just content and there's no reason to have excessive JavaScript or any reason why the page can't be perfectly functional without it.

the_gastropod 10y ago
I often hear rationalizations about how x couldn't be built with graceful degradation in mind. There certainly are _some_ examples (games, for example). But GMail doesn't strike me as a particularly compelling example. GMail is also _just content_. The fancy ajax interactions, though nice, are hardly required for an email client.
- afarrell 10y ago
  I think doing what they do, having a less-fancy separate client, is less complex.
- sanderjd 10y ago
  This is a-historical by my memory - the entire reason Gmail became so successful was that its use of "fancy ajax interactions" made it shockingly nicer to use than any of its competitors at the time. I think if one of your main selling points is interactivity afforded by javascript, then it is unlikely to have much return on investment to accommodate users who don't want that. But for sure people should be thinking harder about what their selling points really are - the market for "it's better because of ajax!" is probably tapped out.
  - FroshKiller 10y ago
    AJAX isn't why Gmail became successful. What set Gmail apart from its competitors was the huge amount of initial storage you got (1 GB for free at a time when Hotmail offered less than 10 MB for free), a higher maximum attachment size (25 MB compared to the webmail standard 10 MB), Google search, and conversation view. All of which, by the way, worked with the AJAX-free basic HTML view.

adrusi 10y ago

The semantic web failed in large part because browsers didn't implement XSL, and so the average web developer never learned about the idea of sending structured data to the client as XML and using XSLT to instruct browsers to render the data as XHTML. If these specs hadn't been released in the middle of Internet-Explorer-monopoly-induced-browser-stagnation then they wouldn't have been dismissed as failures by the time browser competition increased and standards started to be honored. I'm not sure that the semantic web would succeed even if it were a new idea today. HTML5 was popular because it gave web developers tons of shiny toys and got them excited to use it. XHTML was conceptually beautiful but it hardly enabled any user-visible improvements over HTML4, so only the philosophically-minded web developers gave a fuck.