Rapid Browser Development Challenges Web Developers 221
Esther Schindler writes "Feeling a little overwhelmed by changing web standards and new browser choices? You aren't the only one. Mozilla is launching development tracks for the next two editions of its Firefox Web browser immediately, with hopes to push both into general release before the end of the year. This while Microsoft previews Internet Explorer 10 on the heels of its IE9 release, and Google projects Chrome 13 just one year after Chrome 7. Meanwhile, HTML5, the next version of the Web's primary language, appears to have entered a permanent gestation phase. Writes Scott Fulton: All the confusion has prompted Web developers to ask this question: What do we develop our sites against now?"
And the standard is.... (Score:2, Informative)
....IE 6!
Hit standards, miss the market (Score:3, Informative)
See comment on "testing" - if we simply targeted standards, we'd never deliver product.
BTW, this happens in other industries too. Life is harder than college - get used to it.
This article is confused (Score:5, Informative)
This article is confused in so many ways, it's hard to know where to begin.
One big thing that it misses is that a lot of "HTML5" is actually writing a detailed spec for existing features that were never properly specified (e.g., HTML parsing). And a lot of the work of implementing HTML5 in a browser is to get those details right so they're the same across browsers. That helps Web authors who aren't even using any of the new features.
The list of HTML5 features has many errors. "contenteditable" is nothing to do with Web Forms and is not new in HTML5; it's been implemented in all browsers for a long time, and HTML5 just provides a (partial) spec for it. Falling back to SVG when canvas isn't available would be a mistake since every browser that supports SVG also supports canvas.
I don't know how Microsoft's "native" sloganeering got mixed up in there, because it's completely irrelevant, but let's point out that it's completely bogus. It's not even clear what they mean by "native"; the best guess is that it means "abstraction layers are bad so a browser that only runs on Windows 7 must be the best", which is complete nonsense.
John Foliot is wrong about the need for frozen spec snapshots. We often find errors in supposedly "stable" parts of the spec; if those parts are frozen in some official snapshot, that just means the snapshot is going to be more wrong than the the up-to-date version.
Web developers should always look at the latest versions of the specs for the features they use. They should decide what features to use by looking at the browser usage of their user community and making their own cost/benefit calculations.