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That's the cool thing about open standards. As long as individual pieces are to spec, it's completely ok to rewrite modules and components from the ground: Peo

That's the cool thing about open standards. As long as individual pieces are to spec, it's completely ok to rewrite modules and components from the ground: People rely on the standard, and not the app.

ibotty 10y ago
Intra-browser-communication does not often follow a spec though. Of course, replacing a parser (for video formats, or css) is easier because of standards, but how to composite parts of an html site? That's not covered by standards.
- kibwen 10y ago
  Is there an argument that it should be?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
ksk 10y ago
True, but the W3C so far has done a horrible job at defining standards, which partly explains why no two browsers can render identically.
- kibwen 10y ago
  Most of the rendering differences I've seen date back to the era before anyone cared about standards. Can you give an example of a modern feature (i.e. not tables) that different browsers render differently due to ambiguities in the spec?
  - sametmax 10y ago
    UI for the HTML rich elements such as the spinner. Punnycode encoded email addresses in email fields. Numerical keyboard on number fields. The whole mess with WebRTC. Video elements codecs. History API in early mobile browsers. The various APIs for storing data locally in the browser (particularly regarding blocking and size limit). Data expiration. This one is so messed up it makes me angry. Spawning a background task. And those are just the ones that popped in my head in a few minutes.
  - Manishearth 10y ago
    There are a lot of bugs out there. They're usually hard to trigger, but you come across them when working on browsers. For example, the animation of 3d CSS transforms (which needs SLERP) differs in some test cases across different browsers. I don't think any browser displays the correct behavior here, though the spec is a copy of what webkit does so I suspect the spec gets it wrong too. Other engines have an implementation of the algorithm that doesn't match the spec textually. I'm unsure if the algorithms used in these browsers are actually equivalent and it's an implementation bug, or if the algorithm picked is wrong. However these are just really examples of bugs. There have been cases where the spec itself is buggy, and cases where it is ambiguous, but both get addressed. The specs these days try hard to avoid this. But bugs will happen.
  - ksk 10y ago
    Here's one. http://www.bizcoder.com/how-not-to-write-spec-documents http://www.bizcoder.com/how-not-to-write-spec-documents Most of these bugs will only be found by the people given the task to implement the spec, not users of the implementation.

ibotty 10y ago

Intra-browser-communication does not often follow a spec though. Of course, replacing a parser (for video formats, or css) is easier because of standards, but how to composite parts of an html site? That's not covered by standards.

kibwen 10y ago
Is there an argument that it should be?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

ksk 10y ago

True, but the W3C so far has done a horrible job at defining standards, which partly explains why no two browsers can render identically.

kibwen 10y ago
Most of the rendering differences I've seen date back to the era before anyone cared about standards. Can you give an example of a modern feature (i.e. not tables) that different browsers render differently due to ambiguities in the spec?
- sametmax 10y ago
  UI for the HTML rich elements such as the spinner. Punnycode encoded email addresses in email fields. Numerical keyboard on number fields. The whole mess with WebRTC. Video elements codecs. History API in early mobile browsers. The various APIs for storing data locally in the browser (particularly regarding blocking and size limit). Data expiration. This one is so messed up it makes me angry. Spawning a background task. And those are just the ones that popped in my head in a few minutes.
- Manishearth 10y ago
  There are a lot of bugs out there. They're usually hard to trigger, but you come across them when working on browsers. For example, the animation of 3d CSS transforms (which needs SLERP) differs in some test cases across different browsers. I don't think any browser displays the correct behavior here, though the spec is a copy of what webkit does so I suspect the spec gets it wrong too. Other engines have an implementation of the algorithm that doesn't match the spec textually. I'm unsure if the algorithms used in these browsers are actually equivalent and it's an implementation bug, or if the algorithm picked is wrong. However these are just really examples of bugs. There have been cases where the spec itself is buggy, and cases where it is ambiguous, but both get addressed. The specs these days try hard to avoid this. But bugs will happen.
- ksk 10y ago
  Here's one. http://www.bizcoder.com/how-not-to-write-spec-documents http://www.bizcoder.com/how-not-to-write-spec-documents Most of these bugs will only be found by the people given the task to implement the spec, not users of the implementation.