4 ms·

The IE block model was better though, and everyone is using it today with box-sizing: border-box. I still maintain that the pragmatic and sensible thing to do w

by arp242 3y ago

The IE block model was better though, and everyone is using it today with box-sizing: border-box. I still maintain that the pragmatic and sensible thing to do was to just modify the standard – "best viewed in IE" was a self-inflicted wound. Also remember the context: Netscape was just as gung-ho with standards as IE and everyone was kind of figuring out what did and didn't work on the fly. To just ossify a standard at some point just made no sense, and to keep bashing on IE for their better box model "because Micro$hit bad" made even less sense. Good standards respond to what's going on in reality.

cubefox 3y ago
The standards are there for a reason (interoperability), so following them makes sense even if a browser vendor reasonably thinks it should have been done differently. If everyone just implemented what they think is best, no standard would be required in the first place. Apart from that, IE6 also had massive rendering bugs and no CSS2 support. They only fixed the worst stuff five years later, with IE7. Of course web developers still had to wrestle IE6 for years after that, as its market share declined only slowly.
- arp242 3y ago
  In this case, the standard reduced interoperability. As a general point you're correct of course, but you need to consider the context and specific situation. No one implemented standards back then, and IE WAS the de-facto "standard" as it had something like ~98% market share. I'm not saying standards should have been made bug-compatible with IE or even that they should have gone out of their way to accommodate IE, but a "CSS 2.2" cold have updated stuff like the box model which was 1) actually better (or, at the least, equivalent), and 2) a huge pain for everyone. It would have reduced headaches for everyone, and would have been a lot easier than changing every website. Especially non-IE users would have benefited: the people who suffered the most from this weren't the IE users and devs who only cared about IE, they were the Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox and Opera people and devs who cared about them. One has to wonder if uptake of things like Firefox or Opera wouldn't have been much faster in an alternative universe where these changes were made. Mindlessly following standards just makes no sense. Also see GNU and POSIX_ME_HARDER/POSIXLY_CORRECT.
tclancy 3y ago
Sure, and the XMLHttpResponse idea led to everything we have today. But lots of other things didn't work. document.all wasn't any better than Netscape's document.tags but they kept at it until they finally got around to supporting standards. They had major long-term bugs in how margins were figured. The layout model struggled if you used absolute positioning between two elements that were not positioned. Those are just the scars I still have, there were plenty more.

by arp242 3y ago

cubefox 3y ago

The standards are there for a reason (interoperability), so following them makes sense even if a browser vendor reasonably thinks it should have been done differently. If everyone just implemented what they think is best, no standard would be required in the first place. Apart from that, IE6 also had massive rendering bugs and no CSS2 support. They only fixed the worst stuff five years later, with IE7. Of course web developers still had to wrestle IE6 for years after that, as its market share declined only slowly.

arp242 3y ago
In this case, the standard reduced interoperability. As a general point you're correct of course, but you need to consider the context and specific situation. No one implemented standards back then, and IE WAS the de-facto "standard" as it had something like ~98% market share. I'm not saying standards should have been made bug-compatible with IE or even that they should have gone out of their way to accommodate IE, but a "CSS 2.2" cold have updated stuff like the box model which was 1) actually better (or, at the least, equivalent), and 2) a huge pain for everyone. It would have reduced headaches for everyone, and would have been a lot easier than changing every website. Especially non-IE users would have benefited: the people who suffered the most from this weren't the IE users and devs who only cared about IE, they were the Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox and Opera people and devs who cared about them. One has to wonder if uptake of things like Firefox or Opera wouldn't have been much faster in an alternative universe where these changes were made. Mindlessly following standards just makes no sense. Also see GNU and POSIX_ME_HARDER/POSIXLY_CORRECT.

tclancy 3y ago

Sure, and the XMLHttpResponse idea led to everything we have today. But lots of other things didn't work. document.all wasn't any better than Netscape's document.tags but they kept at it until they finally got around to supporting standards. They had major long-term bugs in how margins were figured. The layout model struggled if you used absolute positioning between two elements that were not positioned. Those are just the scars I still have, there were plenty more.