[luriel]

The Web 2.0 craze is leading us back to the "Best viewed with" insanity of the 90's.

And is only going to get worse, with WebGL is not just "Sorry your browser is not supported, please download a different one.", but "Your video card drivers are not supported, buy new hardware and/or install a different Operating System"

[InclinedPlane]

First, the web 2.0 "craze" has already gone through its growing pains half a decade ago, we're in a different era now. Second, this is a false and misleading comparison.

What started the original "best viewed with" problems of the 90s? It was largely due to the lack of compliance with standardization. Every browser had its own buggy way to render content, often slightly different from the equally buggy ways that the competition rendered content. Most web devs at the time were undisciplined and lazy and they tended to use a standard reference browser as a guide for creating their layouts. This led to the insanity of sites that looked fine in one browser but were broken in others, typically due to accidentally making use of rendering bugs.

Now things are completely different. Standards compliant rendering is the norm for all of the most popular browsers. The issue today isn't basic compatibility as it was in the 90s it is now features. In order to push the state of the art in terms of new features on the web it will be necessary for some sites to remind their users that not every browser supports the features their site is built on.

[tripzilch]

Opera is actually fully compliant.

[jenius]

So what exactly do you propose? That we just halt all technological innovation on the web so that people that don't feel better about having old browsers and/or computers?

This is a ridiculous idea, and a ridiculous comment. I'm a web developer and I'm so excited about making awesome things and the fact that the web is evolving and enabling us to do this, and share our creations with the world. People like you and comments like this drive me crazy.

That being said, I don't think that you should just put up a blanket disabled site announcement when it's not necessary (as is the case with opera here), but if your computer or browser is actually missing capabilities because it's too old, that's too bad - you just don't get cool things. Upgrade or move on.

[luriel]

> So what exactly do you propose?

Sane and simple standards that can be implemented in any platform without requiring hundreds of man years of effort.

Nothing done in the web today is particularly technically advanced, we are about the same UI level as standard apps were more than 10 years ago (hell, I doubt you can build a photo manipulation app today that can compete with where Photoshop was 10 years ago).

Most of the complexity burden the web has is purely gratuitous and product of how flawed the standards it is built on are.

How JSON replaced XML is a good illustration of what is the right direction to go. Now if for example JavaScript was replaced with something considerably simpler, like, say, Scheme, instead of trying to bolt even more OO-crud into it and turn it into another pseudo-Java, that would be another good step.

There is little doubt the DOM and CSS could be dramatically simplified without reducing functionality, same goes for HTTP (as a recent post to hacker news illustrated).

[creat0]

"most of the complexity burden of the web is purely gratuitous"

To think that some people are actualy getting paid to make submitting and retrieving data using web overly complicated and annoying is one of those things I try not to think about. The standards idea clearly is not working if it is being interpreted as a mandate for needless complexity to keep web developers entertained. Instead we hear web developers complain that standards are being ignored because some browser will not support their desired gratuitious complexity. I would say they've lost the plot but I'm not sure there ever was a sane plot to begin with.

[jenius]

If your beef was with the W3C, you should have stated that in your original comment. And then do some research on what it is, how it works, and who sits on the panel before you decide to rule them all inefficient idiots.

...then you argue that we should replace javascript with another language, and that would improve "best viewed in" problems? The kinds of changes you are proposing here would make the same issues you complained about 1000x worse. "Sorry, we wrote this in python, so you have to upgrade your browser, because it only runs javascript". This would immediately invalidate all old browsers, rather than slowly upgrading the tools we already have. Progressive enhancement and graceful degradation is how it goes when upgrading, you can't just make vast and rash changes like this.

It's great that you are thinking this way, but you have a lot more thinking to go, and a lot more research before you start posting comments like this.

[SkyMarshal]

>So what exactly do you propose? That we just halt all technological innovation on the web so that people that don't feel better about having old browsers and/or computers?

Straw man.

>This is a ridiculous idea, and a ridiculous comment.

He didn't propose anything, just stated the problem. You're the one putting words in his mouth and jumping to overwrought conclusions.

Relax dude.

[jenius]

Fair enough - it wasn't a totally fair logical argument and you called me out on that one - +1 for that. However, you must acknowledge that the conclusions I jumped to were far from unreasonable. Who complains about technological progress?

[h2s]

    > I'm a web developer

Me too, and I agree with you. I would be interested to hear from anybody who currently works as a professional web developer and thinks that supporting a well-defined set of browsers is a bad idea. I suspect that a lot of this negative commentary is coming from people who have no idea what kind of workload can be added by supporting an extra browser.

[jarek]

The issue isn't "supporting". They actively went out of their way to specifically add code blocking Opera's user-agent string. It's more work to that than to let it through and let it fail if it must.

[chrisro]

Making choices is a part of web development and choosing not to include an audience based on the technology they use is a choice. It's perfectly valid to make that choice--even if it excludes people--but it's a choice (that should be) dependent on the audience you are trying to serve.

For example, I support a few websites aimed at farmers. The sites are simple and degrade gracefully, because farmers tend to use older technology; small, because farmers don't typically have access to broadband internet; and mobile-friendly, because data access via cell phone is often more reliable for them than a consumer internet connection. These sites are not impressive, but they suit their purpose and their audience. So, obviously, the technology choice can go backwards as well.

Side-note: one of my favorite games is "breaking" websites by opening them in IE8 and reloading them with "Compatibility Mode" turned on.

[flyinglizard]

Modern web development is pretty demanding and resource intensive as it is, add not-100%-compatible browsers into the mix and it's hell. I think that considering Microsoft pissing on everyone for over a decade with their IE compatibility issues, Myspace have done a completely reasonable decision. Consider Opera (and whatever other oddball browsers are there) as collateral damage.

Things were of course different if it was a paid service (where users can post demands) or Facebook (where the market penetration is so high they can't afford to forgo non Chrome/FF) but in Myspace's case, I think their decision is completely understandable.

We made the same decision for our site (not yet up) and our user base is way more conservative than Myspace's. We just don't have the resources to do pretty and cross-browser, so we'll have to do with FF and Chrome only.

[lazyjones]

We've had this all the time since the 90's with Flash being required, only we couldn't tell because it was duct-taped onto all major browsers all that time.

Turn off Flash and see how many sites require it (because of bad codec choice / lack of alternative ways of viewing embedded videos, because of crappy ads without fallback images so you get popups/warnings about missing plugins etc.).