14 ms·

The Double Edged Sword of the Web

75 points by macandcheese 10y ago

smoyer 10y ago
"Who is correct isn’t important. What should be important is that browsers put consistency across themselves first." No way - The only way we'll end up with compatibility across browsers is to have unambiguous (as much as possible) specifications that define how they should behave and for browser users to insist their browser vendor aligns with the standard. I lived through that past and have no desire to repeat it. If you think about it from a network theory perspective, each of the browsers is only trying to be compatible with one other party (the specification) in this mode. The alternative is that each browser is trying to be compatible with "n - 1" other parties where n is the number of browsers in the pool. And the total effort is the classic (n * (n - 1)) / 2 "connections", so the browser industry would be wasting a lot of effort. Worse yet, there's no single release point. Consider that browser A makes changes to be compatible with browser B (because that behavior seems correct compared to browser C). Unbeknownst to them, browser B is about to change their behavior to be compatible with browser C. Now the A-team's work is either wasted or yet another incompatibility. Browser-focused standards are the best thing that happened to the web in the last 10+ years. - http://caniuse.com/ http://caniuse.com/ - http://html5readiness.com/ http://html5readiness.com/ (now a bit dated)
- grenoire 10y ago
  The single release point is the specification which defines the behaviour in the first place.
- cptskippy 10y ago
  > If you think about it from a network theory perspective, each of the browsers is only trying to be compatible with one other party (the specification) in this mode. Sadly, it's usually the predominant browser (i.e. Chrome these days) that they're trying to maintain compatibility with and not the specification.
- gnud 10y ago
  "Who is correct isn’t important. What should be important is that browsers put consistency across themselves first." I saw that quote too, and thought that's a weird way to look at it. The other way to look at it, which makes quite a lot more sense to me, is that Chrome is creating the inconsistency by being flat out wrong...
exceptione 10y ago
I wish I could downvote this article. It is from a developer who is married with Google Chrome and who is trying to tell us that other browsers are stupid because they don't have the same bugs as Chrome does. It's especially unnerving for me as a firefox user since these days I come across a lot more sites that make stupid mistakes that just works fine in their Chrome. This mindset makes me angry. The same applies when developers think that if your browser blocks google tracking it is ok to just fuck up the whole website. The web should be - progressive - standards-compliant. Some years ago this was widely believed to be right way forward. Nowadays it seems that developers think that Chrome on OS X is the world we all should live in. Loosely related: I am not going to switch to Chrome. I would never use a browser from an Ad Company like Google, as I don't trust them at all.
- morkro 10y ago
  I have to agree on this one. I have lots of respect for Nicolás and his work, but I think this article shows a little bit of arrogance towards users who don't use Chrome as their primary user. On top of that he disabled accessibility on Firefox entirely in favour of design preferences. Many developer might not care, but it's an attitude which needs to stop.
  - cptskippy 10y ago
    It's more than a little arrogance, it's a superiority complex. My jaw dropped when I read the following because it speaks volumes about his mindset. > As such, visitors are mostly privileged web developers using macOS and Google Chrome.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - JustSomeNobody 10y ago
      Meet the new bullies. Same as the old bullies. There's a lot of this going on in the tech community. Far cry from when <geeks|nerds|smart people> got pushed around... Now they're (we? I hope I'm not like this) the ones doing the pushing.
mstade 10y ago
I don't necessarily agree with the article as a whole, but I do like this bit very much: > Humans will seldom use different browsers. Unless there are gross differences across browsers, like using entirely different sets of font faces, humans are not going to care. We need to learn to let go. Sometimes, the cost/benefit calculation comes out so squarely in the "let's just not" column that even though it may feel wrong to discriminate so blatantly, the economics are just not there. Important to consider whether this discrimination amounts to technical debt which proves costly over time, or whether they are in fact tailored experiences that makes sense to keep around. In any event I agree with the authors sentiment, that chasing the identical look everywhere unicorn often just isn't worth the bother.
fhood 10y ago
I might be crazy, but I think that the dotted version of the colored lines (from Firefox/Safari) looked better than the dashed ones he was so insistent on achieving.
- onli 10y ago
  Not crazy, I though the same, maybe apart from how the border ends with too much whitespace. But we would have to see how it looks in the overall design to properly judge that.
- magic_beans 10y ago
  I definitely agree. He's clearly not a designer...
SNvD7vEJ 10y ago
Weird layout. The article text on the far left, and the side column on the far right with a LOT of white space between. The white space in the middle is as wide as the article text itself. BTW, I'm on a 2560 width screen, using Firefox. And this is what it looks like: http://i.imgur.com/bWwMuNH.png http://i.imgur.com/bWwMuNH.png If this is considered good web design, I'm going back to Lynx ...
- bhauer 10y ago
  It's even more weird on a 40 inch 4K monitor. But it's tuned for a different kind of privileged web developer. The specific privilege that you and I are bringing (large, high resolution displays) evidently makes us not the target audience. Jokes aside, virtually no sites are tuned for large displays, and there's widespread consensus that you shouldn't simply use the full width of the window for text because lines would be too wide to read comfortably. Still, I think my expectation is that most sites just end up centered within large windows. The layout seen here, with columns anchored on the left and right sides, is unfamiliar and looks weird to my eye as well.
  - SNvD7vEJ 10y ago
    I don't know about the "widespread consensus", but forcing people to manually resizing their browser window to fit whatever they currently are reading is bad design in my book. Most good sites, I think, (strangely not Hacker News though) have a width limiting, centered layout which makes it easy to read and browse.
    - WorldMaker 10y ago
      I'll be that odd person to point out that width limiting in a world of widescreens is a strange use of space. I'd personally like to see more love put into CSS3 multi-column support and gentle horizontal scrolling (a standard spec ready equivalent to -ms-scroll-translation, perhaps). I get the feeling I'm in a not very vocal minority of people that currently thinks horizontal scrolling could be a useful answer for an easier to read web on widescreen displays. I find it strange how many sites seem to be more horizontal gutters than content space these days due their fixed width containers recreating a square virtual monitor inside my widescreen monitor. Admittedly it is good for ad space, I guess, because those gutters can be and often are filled with plenty of ads.
gcb0 10y ago
title should be "the hypocrisy of the so called web developers" let's see. they blatantly ignore most browsers to focus on the one they use. and then cames up with excuses ("its over 50% of my visitors") just like IE6. then they get confortable with things that browser does that are proprietary, just like with IE6. then they blame all the other browsers in the word for not dropping everything else and go imitate the proprietary behaviour. they even points out that chrome is the only one not following the standard, and still gets praised, just like IE6. "What should be important is that browsers put consistency across themselves first" is what they say on the article about other browsers not ignoring standards and following the proprietary browser they like. google arrogance over standards and this developer lack of memory and abundance of hypocrisy will give us IE6 all over again. damn you all
HugoDaniel 10y ago
The browser stats used as the foundation for the post is useless because he does not state how many total users was the sample based and what time frame was it taken at. At the limit of this kind of "logic" I could equally say that 100% of google search visitors use TorBrowser (out of 1: me in a very precise time frame).
dasil003 10y ago
The bugs we have to deal with today are a gift from god compared to the bugs we had to deal with 15 years ago when CSS was just getting traction and then we went through 7-8 years of stagnation due to Microsoft trying to leverage their position to hold back the web. Frustrating as multiple engines is to deal with, it's a small price to pay for the benefits of a true open standard. I've been burned enough by WONTFIX bugs in proprietary software (Adobe Flash I'm looking at you) that I know which double-edged sword I'll put my weight behind.

75 points by macandcheese 10y ago

"Who is correct isn’t important. What should be important is that browsers put consistency across themselves first." No way - The only way we'll end up with compatibility across browsers is to have unambiguous (as much as possible) specifications that define how they should behave and for browser users to insist their browser vendor aligns with the standard. I lived through that past and have no desire to repeat it. If you think about it from a network theory perspective, each of the browsers is only trying to be compatible with one other party (the specification) in this mode. The alternative is that each browser is trying to be compatible with "n - 1" other parties where n is the number of browsers in the pool. And the total effort is the classic (n * (n - 1)) / 2 "connections", so the browser industry would be wasting a lot of effort. Worse yet, there's no single release point. Consider that browser A makes changes to be compatible with browser B (because that behavior seems correct compared to browser C). Unbeknownst to them, browser B is about to change their behavior to be compatible with browser C. Now the A-team's work is either wasted or yet another incompatibility. Browser-focused standards are the best thing that happened to the web in the last 10+ years. - http://caniuse.com/ http://caniuse.com/ - http://html5readiness.com/ http://html5readiness.com/ (now a bit dated)

grenoire 10y ago
The single release point is the specification which defines the behaviour in the first place.
cptskippy 10y ago
> If you think about it from a network theory perspective, each of the browsers is only trying to be compatible with one other party (the specification) in this mode. Sadly, it's usually the predominant browser (i.e. Chrome these days) that they're trying to maintain compatibility with and not the specification.
gnud 10y ago
"Who is correct isn’t important. What should be important is that browsers put consistency across themselves first." I saw that quote too, and thought that's a weird way to look at it. The other way to look at it, which makes quite a lot more sense to me, is that Chrome is creating the inconsistency by being flat out wrong...

exceptione 10y ago

I wish I could downvote this article. It is from a developer who is married with Google Chrome and who is trying to tell us that other browsers are stupid because they don't have the same bugs as Chrome does. It's especially unnerving for me as a firefox user since these days I come across a lot more sites that make stupid mistakes that just works fine in their Chrome. This mindset makes me angry. The same applies when developers think that if your browser blocks google tracking it is ok to just fuck up the whole website. The web should be - progressive - standards-compliant. Some years ago this was widely believed to be right way forward. Nowadays it seems that developers think that Chrome on OS X is the world we all should live in. Loosely related: I am not going to switch to Chrome. I would never use a browser from an Ad Company like Google, as I don't trust them at all.

morkro 10y ago
I have to agree on this one. I have lots of respect for Nicolás and his work, but I think this article shows a little bit of arrogance towards users who don't use Chrome as their primary user. On top of that he disabled accessibility on Firefox entirely in favour of design preferences. Many developer might not care, but it's an attitude which needs to stop.
- cptskippy 10y ago
  It's more than a little arrogance, it's a superiority complex. My jaw dropped when I read the following because it speaks volumes about his mindset. > As such, visitors are mostly privileged web developers using macOS and Google Chrome.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - JustSomeNobody 10y ago
    Meet the new bullies. Same as the old bullies. There's a lot of this going on in the tech community. Far cry from when <geeks|nerds|smart people> got pushed around... Now they're (we? I hope I'm not like this) the ones doing the pushing.

mstade 10y ago

I don't necessarily agree with the article as a whole, but I do like this bit very much: > Humans will seldom use different browsers. Unless there are gross differences across browsers, like using entirely different sets of font faces, humans are not going to care. We need to learn to let go. Sometimes, the cost/benefit calculation comes out so squarely in the "let's just not" column that even though it may feel wrong to discriminate so blatantly, the economics are just not there. Important to consider whether this discrimination amounts to technical debt which proves costly over time, or whether they are in fact tailored experiences that makes sense to keep around. In any event I agree with the authors sentiment, that chasing the identical look everywhere unicorn often just isn't worth the bother.

fhood 10y ago

I might be crazy, but I think that the dotted version of the colored lines (from Firefox/Safari) looked better than the dashed ones he was so insistent on achieving.

onli 10y ago
Not crazy, I though the same, maybe apart from how the border ends with too much whitespace. But we would have to see how it looks in the overall design to properly judge that.
magic_beans 10y ago
I definitely agree. He's clearly not a designer...

SNvD7vEJ 10y ago

Weird layout. The article text on the far left, and the side column on the far right with a LOT of white space between. The white space in the middle is as wide as the article text itself. BTW, I'm on a 2560 width screen, using Firefox. And this is what it looks like: http://i.imgur.com/bWwMuNH.png http://i.imgur.com/bWwMuNH.png If this is considered good web design, I'm going back to Lynx ...

bhauer 10y ago
It's even more weird on a 40 inch 4K monitor. But it's tuned for a different kind of privileged web developer. The specific privilege that you and I are bringing (large, high resolution displays) evidently makes us not the target audience. Jokes aside, virtually no sites are tuned for large displays, and there's widespread consensus that you shouldn't simply use the full width of the window for text because lines would be too wide to read comfortably. Still, I think my expectation is that most sites just end up centered within large windows. The layout seen here, with columns anchored on the left and right sides, is unfamiliar and looks weird to my eye as well.
- SNvD7vEJ 10y ago
  I don't know about the "widespread consensus", but forcing people to manually resizing their browser window to fit whatever they currently are reading is bad design in my book. Most good sites, I think, (strangely not Hacker News though) have a width limiting, centered layout which makes it easy to read and browse.
  - WorldMaker 10y ago
    I'll be that odd person to point out that width limiting in a world of widescreens is a strange use of space. I'd personally like to see more love put into CSS3 multi-column support and gentle horizontal scrolling (a standard spec ready equivalent to -ms-scroll-translation, perhaps). I get the feeling I'm in a not very vocal minority of people that currently thinks horizontal scrolling could be a useful answer for an easier to read web on widescreen displays. I find it strange how many sites seem to be more horizontal gutters than content space these days due their fixed width containers recreating a square virtual monitor inside my widescreen monitor. Admittedly it is good for ad space, I guess, because those gutters can be and often are filled with plenty of ads.

gcb0 10y ago

title should be "the hypocrisy of the so called web developers" let's see. they blatantly ignore most browsers to focus on the one they use. and then cames up with excuses ("its over 50% of my visitors") just like IE6. then they get confortable with things that browser does that are proprietary, just like with IE6. then they blame all the other browsers in the word for not dropping everything else and go imitate the proprietary behaviour. they even points out that chrome is the only one not following the standard, and still gets praised, just like IE6. "What should be important is that browsers put consistency across themselves first" is what they say on the article about other browsers not ignoring standards and following the proprietary browser they like. google arrogance over standards and this developer lack of memory and abundance of hypocrisy will give us IE6 all over again. damn you all

HugoDaniel 10y ago

The browser stats used as the foundation for the post is useless because he does not state how many total users was the sample based and what time frame was it taken at. At the limit of this kind of "logic" I could equally say that 100% of google search visitors use TorBrowser (out of 1: me in a very precise time frame).

dasil003 10y ago

The bugs we have to deal with today are a gift from god compared to the bugs we had to deal with 15 years ago when CSS was just getting traction and then we went through 7-8 years of stagnation due to Microsoft trying to leverage their position to hold back the web. Frustrating as multiple engines is to deal with, it's a small price to pay for the benefits of a true open standard. I've been burned enough by WONTFIX bugs in proprietary software (Adobe Flash I'm looking at you) that I know which double-edged sword I'll put my weight behind.