Jeremy Keith

> IE6 has been a source of pain for… I'd say four years.

We're in late 2011 right? That puts Paul's "IE6 being a pain" in late 2007, right after the original iPhone was released.

By that time, Firefox 2 was a year old, Firebug was 18 months old, and Safari 3 (the first version with acceptable Javascript support) had just been released, making Drosera (which would morph into the Webkit Developer Tools the next year) available.

Hell, by late 2007 IE7 was a year old already. And a significant reason why the IE project was restarted (and IE7 produced) is developers getting fed up with IE6, its bugs, its antiquated tools and its lack of progress, and Firefox had been getting more and more traction since its 1.0 release in late 2004.

IE6 has been a pain for at least 6 years now. 2005 was Firefox 1.5, the announce for the IE project restart and the grand opening of On Having Layout [0], the tail end of the long, slow and painful discovery of IE6's innumerable rendering bugs, DOM and javascript limitations (anybody else remembers Drip and Joel Webber's "DHTML leaks like a sieve"? That's January 2005), painfully slow runtime & al.

Of course it makes sense that 2005 would have been such a sticking point: the web community had been playing around with CSS since ~2003 (CSS Zen Garden released that year) and was wrapping up the IE6 CSS bugs compendium (see above-mentioned On Having Layout, pretty much the culmination of the effort).

Late 2004 and (especially) 2005 it started to…

A proper standard for syncing rss? So that, like email, you just have to point your various clients at the address of the sync server you are using. That can be one you run yourself or one from some third party provider. If your provider closes you can just point your clients at the new service, without each client needing to implement a new custom API. You are also free to use whatever client(s) you want. It seems to me like this should have been part of RSS since the beginning.

The web community seems disinterested in developing standards other than presentational ones (HTML/CSS), I guess largely for commercial reasons: the creators of services want to lock you into their specific (magic hip RESTful JSON) API.

Five years ago, if you wanted to show content from one site or app on your own site or app, you could use a simple, documented format to do so, without requiring a business-development deal or contractual agreement between the sites. Thus, user experiences weren’t subject to the vagaries of the political battles between different companies, but instead were consistently based on the extensible architecture of the web itself. -- Anil Dash [1]

[1] http://adactio.com/journal/6291/

Flash is disabled (not JS).

Boy am I starting to get tired of companies talking about how much they love HTML5 without walking the walk. Google employes Ian Hickson, the “dictator” at HTML5’s helm,† but fails to support <video> with a Flash fallback. It’s really not hard!

Adobe is guilty of this hypocrisy; Google is quite guilty… only Apple is mostly walking the walk (you never need Flash for any of their web properties), and increasingly Microsoft (no Flash or Silverlight is needed for http://zoom.it).

Edit: YouTube supporting HTML5 ≠ this Google web page supporting HTML5.

And FWIW, even the YouTube HTML5 beta is insufficient — Many times nothing at all will play, even though third-party sites like DetURL or File2HD can find .MP4 files for that video, and the video plays fine on iOS(!). And I’m using Chrome with the plugin completely disabled, for Chrissake — Given there is no technical reason they can’t tell I don’t have Flash, it becomes obvious no one at Google cares about walking the walk.

†Dear downvoters: I am not making up, Hixie refers to himself this way. http://adactio.com/journal/1600/

Here is one of the lines of the source code:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, minimum-scale=1, maximum-scale=1">

For those who don't know, this disables user scrolling on every standards-compliant mobile device. The reason is a bug on iOS, that causes test to flow off screen when changing orientation on non-default zoom levels. http://adactio.com/journal/4470/

I really wish more sites would enable it by default, then use javascript to disable it for iOS devices. I have come across many sites with small text that I want to zoom, but can't (this is especially bad for people with poor eyesight). Disabling it for everyone reminds me of the days of IE5 and 6, when other browsers were hampered by IE's bugs; we are only starting to see what having no bug-ridden, dominant browser on the Desktop can bring.

Before anyone says that browsers shouldn't implement this feature, they should. For better or worse, it is a part of the standard. Using browsers that don't implement parts of the standard would bring about situations even worse then this.

One of the links articles [1] makes an interesting claim that feels like a reach to me, but I'd be interested in hearing HN's take on it:

> At this point React is legacy technology, like Angular. Lots of people are still using it, but nobody can quite remember why. The decision-makers in organisations who chose to build everything with React have long since left. People starting new projects who still decide to build on React are doing it largely out of habit.

I'm going to withhold my own thoughts about that quote, cause I'm curious what everyone else thinks.

Wrt. Web Components, I played around with Web Components about half a decade ago and they felt promising but not ready for prime time yet. They were pretty messy and felt like they did a poor job of encapsulation, ultimately. (At least at the time.) I haven't looked at them recently, but the code examples in this articles look much better (and cleaner) than what I remember.

[1] https://adactio.com/journal/20618

When I learnt front-end dev there were no seniors to learn from — I was part of the first generation, and we pretty much just made it up as we went. We learnt by trial and error, and by looking at each others source code.

And blogs. Read web dev blogs. Much more up to date than books, and you get to see the latest ideas and take part in discussions of evolving standards. My favs: A List Apart, Adactio, Smashing Magazine, CSS-Tricks, Zeldman, Stuff & Nonsense, The Web Ahead, Mozilla Hacks, Coding Horror.

https://alistapart.com

https://adactio.com

https://www.smashingmagazine.com

https://css-tricks.com

http://www.zeldman.com

https://stuffandnonsense.co.uk

http://5by5.tv/webahead

https://hacks.mozilla.org

https://blog.codinghorror.com