4 ms·

Hard not to enjoy the schadenfreude of a company begging developers to support web standards after holding the entire web hostage for years due to outright cyni

Hard not to enjoy the schadenfreude of a company begging developers to support web standards after holding the entire web hostage for years due to outright cynical negligence. Must be very tasty medicine for them. They do happen to incidentally be right that we should try to adhere to the standards but to compare the state of WebKit today to the darkest days of IE6's reign is pure chutzpah.

mistercow 14y ago
>They do happen to incidentally be right that we should try to adhere to the standards but to compare the state of WebKit today to the darkest days of IE6's reign is pure chutzpah. In fairness, that appears to be what ars is saying, not what MS is saying.
FireBeyond 14y ago
To complete the circle of irony, it seems that some of the developers who were the loudest to shout about standards-compliant web design and development when IE held the reigns are now guilty of much the same thing - the number of sites (and indeed blogs that either implicitly or explicitly state the same) that seem to have been designed with a "Looks great in Safari on my Mac, my iPad and my iPhone, ship it". For one (unnamed example), I recently built a launch page with a service that purports to do just that, provide a landing page of the "Coming Soon" variety, the ability to customize some links, provide some metrics, etc, and give your users a single page as a placeholder. The interface for this design - and more importantly the resultant page for end users - is utterly horrific, largely unusable in Firefox, Chrome and IE10.
- derleth 14y ago
  > standards-compliant web design I persist in misreading this as standards-complaint web design.
- EricDeb 14y ago
  I thought Safari and Chrome both use webkit? Shouldn't your site be at least usable in Chrome then?
  - kevingadd 14y ago
    There are numerous differences between Safari and Chrome. The two have diverged quite a bit even if they are both technically 'webkit'.
hosay123 14y ago
Ignoring the evidence you read little more than the title, the doublethink required to produce this comment staggers belief. The "darkest days of IE6's reign" was a direct result of Internet Explorer from about IE4 onwards beating the pants out of Netscape on technical excellence (ironically in this context, including CSS support), a situation that Chrome in particular is now well on its way to repeating. As for whether Chrome or Safari are 'better' in some way than Microsoft of yesteryear, both companies have an attitude toward backwards compatibility that could at best be described as 'disposable', particularly in the case of Google. In the meantime, Chrome is pushing a new 'open source' version of ActiveX on the world (NaCl), and extended the web specs so much that they've all but plain given up on cooperation with the W3C in favour of their own kangaroo court (WHATWG). I could go on..
- cageface 14y ago
  So IE's short-lived superiority negates the many many subsequent years that followed (the dark days) in which it was a stinking dead weight around the neck of every web developer on the planet? The only double-think and belief staggering in play here is the idea that a rapidly evolving, open-source and highly standard compliant modern browser (Chrome) is anything like IE at any point in its history except perhaps the present day.

mistercow 14y ago

>They do happen to incidentally be right that we should try to adhere to the standards but to compare the state of WebKit today to the darkest days of IE6's reign is pure chutzpah. In fairness, that appears to be what ars is saying, not what MS is saying.

FireBeyond 14y ago

To complete the circle of irony, it seems that some of the developers who were the loudest to shout about standards-compliant web design and development when IE held the reigns are now guilty of much the same thing - the number of sites (and indeed blogs that either implicitly or explicitly state the same) that seem to have been designed with a "Looks great in Safari on my Mac, my iPad and my iPhone, ship it". For one (unnamed example), I recently built a launch page with a service that purports to do just that, provide a landing page of the "Coming Soon" variety, the ability to customize some links, provide some metrics, etc, and give your users a single page as a placeholder. The interface for this design - and more importantly the resultant page for end users - is utterly horrific, largely unusable in Firefox, Chrome and IE10.

derleth 14y ago
> standards-compliant web design I persist in misreading this as standards-complaint web design.
EricDeb 14y ago
I thought Safari and Chrome both use webkit? Shouldn't your site be at least usable in Chrome then?
- kevingadd 14y ago
  There are numerous differences between Safari and Chrome. The two have diverged quite a bit even if they are both technically 'webkit'.

hosay123 14y ago

Ignoring the evidence you read little more than the title, the doublethink required to produce this comment staggers belief. The "darkest days of IE6's reign" was a direct result of Internet Explorer from about IE4 onwards beating the pants out of Netscape on technical excellence (ironically in this context, including CSS support), a situation that Chrome in particular is now well on its way to repeating. As for whether Chrome or Safari are 'better' in some way than Microsoft of yesteryear, both companies have an attitude toward backwards compatibility that could at best be described as 'disposable', particularly in the case of Google. In the meantime, Chrome is pushing a new 'open source' version of ActiveX on the world (NaCl), and extended the web specs so much that they've all but plain given up on cooperation with the W3C in favour of their own kangaroo court (WHATWG). I could go on..

cageface 14y ago
So IE's short-lived superiority negates the many many subsequent years that followed (the dark days) in which it was a stinking dead weight around the neck of every web developer on the planet? The only double-think and belief staggering in play here is the idea that a rapidly evolving, open-source and highly standard compliant modern browser (Chrome) is anything like IE at any point in its history except perhaps the present day.