3 ms·

> Even when they have been fixed in the latest Chrome or Safari, older WebKit implementations like PhantomJS and UIWebView still don't have the fix. We've had t

> Even when they have been fixed in the latest Chrome or Safari, older WebKit implementations like PhantomJS and UIWebView still don't have the fix. We've had to put back several of these as users reported problems with the beta. It's starting to feel like oldIE all over again, but with a different set of excuses for why nothing can be fixed. I am fairly new to web development, but this consistent droning (whining) about having to develop for a myriad of inconsistent platforms seems like braying from rather entitled web developers. I don't understand when in the history of software development developers weren't forced to dick with platform and legacy problems. Can someone explain what, if anything makes web dev different? And if they can't, can we please just stop bringing it up like it's ever been a new problem?

contextfree 14y ago
Is the "whining" particular to web developers either, or have developers always complained about the platform and legacy problems they've been forced to dick with (look at the angst over Android fragmentation for example)?
dmethvin 14y ago
Before getting into web dev I spent a lot of time doing development in C/C++. That code needed to be portable across systems and versions but it was an entirely different kind of portable than we grapple with on the web. For C code we could handle the issue with conditional compilation, build scripts, or dynamic loading. On the web it's all dynamic; all the code for handling every situation you might encounter comes down to the client when the page loads and you sort out the details at runtime while the user taps their fingers on the table. If there is a large amount of code to fix one specific browser you can break that out and pull it down only for that browser, but the kind of bugs that jQuery works around tend to be of the death-by-a-thousand-little-cuts variety where it just doesn't pay to refactor that way.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- dclowd9901 14y ago
  Thanks for the answer, I haven't done any application dev before so I suppose I'll learn all of this as I work with iOS.

contextfree 14y ago

Is the "whining" particular to web developers either, or have developers always complained about the platform and legacy problems they've been forced to dick with (look at the angst over Android fragmentation for example)?

dmethvin 14y ago

Before getting into web dev I spent a lot of time doing development in C/C++. That code needed to be portable across systems and versions but it was an entirely different kind of portable than we grapple with on the web. For C code we could handle the issue with conditional compilation, build scripts, or dynamic loading. On the web it's all dynamic; all the code for handling every situation you might encounter comes down to the client when the page loads and you sort out the details at runtime while the user taps their fingers on the table. If there is a large amount of code to fix one specific browser you can break that out and pull it down only for that browser, but the kind of bugs that jQuery works around tend to be of the death-by-a-thousand-little-cuts variety where it just doesn't pay to refactor that way.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
dclowd9901 14y ago
Thanks for the answer, I haven't done any application dev before so I suppose I'll learn all of this as I work with iOS.