Proprietary CSS rules - Are we returning to 1995?
Posted by jamie Tue, 30 Oct 2007 09:44:00 GMT
Call me a cynic, but posts like this one on the Surfin’ Safari blog worry me a little. Let me explain…
I don’t know if anyone remembers back to the days of Netscape 4 and Explorer 3.5? – It was a time of table based layouts and browser sniffing. Each browser had it’s own “feature” set and this resulted in hacks galore, for example Netscape had “Layers” but Explorer didn’t, Explorer had feature X but Netscape didn’t.
Along came Web Standards and the likes of Jeffrey Zeldman fighting for a standards based approach to web development. Over a decade on, it looks like were finally getting there as even Microsoft slowly start to get things right with IE7.
As cool as the CSS Transform stuff looks, I can’t help but think we’re stepping right back into 1995?
I would have to disagree somewhat. its true that there are more features that will likely never be standardized across all browsers.
Making standards based sites is easier now than ever. But webkit is used for way more than just websites. Its a very important view for all sorts of applications and widgets. It used a lot in the iphone too.
I for one welcome our new robot overlords.
I think yes, it’s a little like 1995, but we had to have 1995 to get here, so in time it will be worth it.
It’s a valid concern but this has continued to happen in just about every browser. Mozilla/Firefox have proprietary CSS features to give you things like rounded corners and such.
It’s really left at the responsibility of each HTML/CSS person to make good (rationale) decisions in their HTML code. We’ve worked on several projects where we’ve known that we’d be working with browser X exclusively so we’d fine tune it for that browser and occasionally taking advantage of the proprietary features.
I assume that these new Safari features are some additions they made to help enhance their applications, such as iTunes. If they’re doing the work, why not give away these tools to the community. I’m sure that Apple would love to see Webkit used for more “desktop” applications, just like Mozilla aimed to do with XUL.
I suppose that is how things have moved forward over the years, however I would like to see it put into a spec first which then all browser vendors can conform to …you never know, Microsoft may even implement them by 2017 ;)
I would have thought, getting full support for CSS3 across all browser would take priority over new non-standard rules, then write these new features into the next CSS spec.
I may be wrong, maybe that’s not the best way to innovate due to the time it takes these things to make it into a spec.
I bet there’s a really good reason why they’re adding in this stuff now.
I wonder if it’s going to be used on the iPhone and Google Android.
Most every Javascript CSS animation library runs really badly on the iPhone. Could be the CSS animations and transformations will be hardware accelerated on the iPhone and suchlike devices.
Could end up being a huge boost to tons of apps too.
The WebKit team is pretty good about sharing back to the community with specs and whatnot. But if we all relied on specs, nothing would ever get done. There would still be no AJAX or innerHTML.
I believe that making something an “official” standard after it’s already a real-world standard is a perfectly valid way to go.
I wants me some cool toys! ;)
I guess the problems come up when each browser implements something kindof the same in a different kind of way. That’s unhip. But at least all browsers can do AJAX now, even if you do have to fork your code or use a js library.