Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by shadowmint 4448 days ago
See, when they invented new web browsers, the old websites still worked on them!

...and therein lies the difference.

2 comments

> See, when they invented new web browsers, the old websites still worked on them!

Yeah. But only because they rendered the old websites in various quirks modes[1] that emulated the rendering engines of the old web browsers.

Thankfully, web browser developers did not share the analagous mindset to the people saying 'lets stick with python2-compatible semantics forever', or we'd still be writing sites that had to be backwards-compatible with IE6, instead of having the option to specify a modern doctype and use IE6-incompatible markup (the analogy to using a python3 shebang line and writing python2-incompatible code).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quirks_mode

Whatever. You're splitting hairs.

The sites worked. Quirks mode is now being phased out, but it served its purpose. The analogy Im making is obvious:

Python 3 should have run python 2 code and slowly rolled old semantics into depreciation; this whole mess could never have existed.

Its not as simple as 'just port your code and run python3'

Er, not all of them, that's why the old browsers were still used.