Havoc Inspired

I’m not going to repeat Andy post here so read it yourself on his site. The question I asked however was this:

Okay, well IE8 is also missing a few of the other more popular CSS3 selectors that are available in other browsers, like border-radius and things like that. Is this a setback for CSS3?

And he answered:

The interesting thing, though, and this is the wider issue, is that there’s no strategic plan, either from the browser makers or, most importantly, from the CSS working group, where they plan in a timetable implementation of these new features. Now we’re not talking about the big design of CSS, and when are we going to get new layout features and things like that, but simple things like for example CSS columns? Webkit implements CSS columns, Mozilla implements CSS columns, but they do it independently, they do it when they want to on their own timetable, and what I’d really like to see is for these browser makers to get together and say “You know what in September, we’re going to introduce these columns across the board, and in October, or in our next release, we’re going to implement this across the board.”

This really got me thinking…

It wouldn’t just be nice if browser manufacturers collaborated more, it’s vital!

The web is evolving at an unprecedented rate, and users expectations of the web are evolving too. Unfortunately we as developers are hindered by the restrictions of the browsers that these users utilize and I’m not just talking about Microsoft.

The simple fact of the matter is, unless all browsers introduce, for example, the same CSS style at relatively the same time, we as developers can not implement them.

In some cases we can employ progressive enhancement, like with the border-radius style available in Firefox & Safari, but background layers? No way. Not until all browser support the style consistently will us as developers begin to implement it to any great effect.

The CSS3 specification has been in working draft since May 2001. Only now with the release of IE8 have Microsoft got the rendering of CSS2 (recommendation May 1998) working properly (fingers crossed). It’s about time browser manufacturers got the fingers out and started working together to improve the web for all.

As a developer I find this industry an exciting one to work in, there’s always something new to play with and improve, but imagine were we would be today if say five years ago, browser manufacturers had all got together, said to each other “OK, lets make all our browsers render in the same way and support the same things” and started focusing on their individual browser interfaces and browser features, which to the average user is all the market upon anyway.

We designers/developers would be much further along at build the beautiful web that Andy advocates.