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by coldtea 4075 days ago
>If I understand correctly, you are asking the browser to provide a workaround for a website that isn't optimised for mobile, and asking that browser to maintain that workaround forever?

Yeah, why not? Programs exists to help their users. I could not care less if the website developers are sloppy or whatever, if the browser can give me legible text, it should do it.
2 comments
nilliams 4075 days ago
Because, like the other downvoted-for-no-reason commenter posted that's great for you in the short-term but bad for all of us in the long-term. Far better if people fix their broken sites. It's analogous to why we as a web developer community suffered overall by 'supporting' IE6 with crazy fallbacks instead of just saying no.
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nitrogen 4075 days ago
The web, as originally envisioned, was supposed to be user agent agnostic. The user agent (AKA browser, search engine, personal AI, braille terminal, screen reader, etc.) would interpret the page and process or display it appropriately for the agent's purpose and medium. Thus, sites shouldn't have to adapt to mobile; it should be possible to write one semantic site that looks right on any device, because the user agent is supposed to do the formatting.

Removing that ability from user agents is counter to users needs and the basic design of the web.

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coldtea 4075 days ago
>It's analogous to why we as a web developer community suffered overall by 'supporting' IE6 with crazy fallbacks instead of just saying no.

The reason the "web developer community suffered overall by 'supporting' IE6" is because people wont and dont update their "broken sites". That's a pipe dream. Some are abandoned, others are maintained by amateurs who don't know what they're doing, others don't care, etc.

Users still want to be able to read them, and will switch to a browser that does, if yours doesn't. Unless you control all competitors and can co-ordinate a mass update, you better support them.

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nilliams 4075 days ago
>> The reason the "web developer community suffered overall by 'supporting' IE6" is because people wont and dont update their "broken sites". That's a pipe dream.

I meant that we wasted a lot of effort building IE6-proof sites in recent years. My analogy itself had nothing to do with updating sites. I was trying to give an example of a 'crazy web workaround' that screwed us over in the long-term.

But if we forget analogies and I address your actual claim that:

> [...] people wont and dont update their "broken sites".

We're talking about major sites here (like Reddit) where this is clearly not true as most have updated already. Reddit is something of an exception, though they are clearly working on it as the commenter that linked to the beta `m.reddit.com` has shown.

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oldmanjay 4075 days ago
From your perspective that is true, of course, but it is a greedy perspective that optimizes locally at a cost to the entire ecosystem.
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