Journal tags: fix

Safari has been subjected to a lot of ire recently. Most of that ire has been aimed at the proposed changes to the navigation bar in Safari on iOS—moving it from a fixed top position to a floaty bottom position right over the content you’re trying to interact with.

Courage.

It remains to be seen whether this change will actually ship. That’s why it’s in beta—to gather all the web’s hot takes first.

But while this very visible change is dominating the discussion, invisible changes can be even more important. Or in the case of Safari, the lack of changes.

Compared to other browsers, Safari lags far behind when it comes to shipping features. I’m not necessarily talking about cutting-edge features either. These are often standards that have been out for years. This creates a gap—albeit an invisible one—between Safari and other browsers.

Jorge Arango has noticed this gap:

I use Safari as my primary browser on all my devices. I like how Safari integrates with the rest of the OS, its speed, and privacy features. But, alas, I increasingly have issues rendering websites and applications on Safari.

That’s the perspective of an end-user. Developers who have to deal with the gap in features are more, um, strident in their opinions. Perry Sun wrote For developers, Apple’s Safari is crap and outdated:

Don’t get me wrong, Safari is very good web browser, delivering fast performance and solid privacy features.

But at the same time, the lack of support for key web technologies and APIs has been both perplexing and annoying at the same time.

Alas, that post also indulges in speculation about Apple’s motives which always feels a bit too much like a conspiracy theory to me. Baldur Bjarnason has more to say on that topic in his post Kremlinology and the motivational fallacy when blogging about Apple. He also points to a good example of critiquing Safari without speculating about motives: Dave’s post One-offs and low-expectations with Safari, which documents all the annoying paper cuts inflicted by Safari’s “quirks.”

Another deep dive that avoids speculating about motives comes from Tim Perry: Safari isn’t protecting the web, it’s killing it. I don’t agree with everything in it. I think that Apple—and Mozilla’s—objections to some device APIs are informed by a real concern about privacy and security. But I agree with his point that it’s not enough to just object; you’ve got to offer an alternative vision too.

That same post has a litany of uncontroversial features that shipped in Safari looong after they shipped in other browsers:

Again: these are not contentious features shipping by only Chrome, they’re features with wide support and no clear objections, but Safari is still not shipping them until years later. They’re also not shiny irrelevant features that “bloat the web” in any sense: each example I’ve included above primarily improving core webpage UX and performance. Safari is slowing that down progress here.

But perhaps most damning of all is how Safari deals with bugs.

A recent release of Safari shipped with a really bad Local Storage bug. The bug was fixed within a day. Yay! But the fix won’t ship until …who knows?

This is because browser updates are tied to operating system updates. Yes, this is just like the 90s when Microsoft claimed that Internet Explorer was intrinsically linked to Windows (a tactic that didn’t work out too well for them in the subsequent court case).

I don’t get it. I’m pretty sure that other Apple products ship updates and fixes independentally of OS releases. I’m sure I’ve received software updates for Keynote, Garage Band, and other pieces of software made by Apple.

And yet, of all the applications that need a speedy update cycle—a user agent for the World Wide Web—Apple’s version is needlessly delayed by the release cycle of the entire operating system.

I don’t want to speculate on why this might be. I don’t know the technical details. But I suspect that the root cause might not be technical in nature. Apple have always tied their browser updates to OS releases. If Google’s cardinal sin is avoiding anything “Not Invented Here”, Apple’s downfall is “We’ve always done it this way.”

Evergreen browsers update in the background, usually at regular intervals. Firefox is an evergreen browser. Chrome is an evergreen browser. Edge is an evergreen browser.

Safari is not an evergreen browser.

That’s frustrating when it comes to new features. It’s unforgivable when it comes to bugs.

At least on Apple’s desktop computers, users have the choice to switch to a different browser. But on Apple’s mobile devices, users have no choice but to use Safari’s rendering engine, bugs and all.

As I wrote when I had to deal with one of Safari’s bugs:

I wish that Apple would allow other rendering engines to be installed on iOS devices. But if that’s a hell-freezing-over prospect, I wish that Safari updates weren’t tied to operating system updates.

Vendor prefixes didn’t work. The theory was sound. It was a way of marking CSS and JavaScript features as being experimental. Developers could use the prefixed properties as long as they understood that those features weren’t to be relied upon.

That’s not what happened though. Developers used vendor-prefixed properties as though they were stable. Tutorials were published that basically said “Go ahead and use these vendor-prefixed properties and ship it!” There were even tools that would add the prefixes for you so you didn’t have to type them out for yourself.

Browsers weren’t completely blameless either. Long after features were standardised, they would only be supported in their prefixed form. Apple was and is the worst for this. To this day, if you want to use the clip-path property in your CSS, you’ll need to duplicate your declaration with -webkit-clip-path if you want to support Safari. It’s been like that for seven years and counting.

Like capitalism, vendor prefixes were one of those ideas that sounded great in theory but ended up being unworkable in practice.

Still, developers need some way to get their hands on experiment features. But we don’t want browsers to ship experimental features without some kind of safety mechanism.

The current thinking involves something called origin trials. Here’s the explainer from Microsoft Edge and here’s Google Chrome’s explainer:

• Developers are able to register for an experimental feature to be enabled on their origin for a fixed period of time measured in months. In exchange, they provide us their email address and agree to give feedback once the experiment ends.
• Usage of these experiments is constrained to remain below Chrome’s deprecation threshold (< 0.5% of all Chrome page loads) by a system which automatically disables the experiment on all origins if this threshold is exceeded.

I think it works pretty well. If you’re really interested in kicking the tyres on an experimental feature, you can opt in to the origin trial. But it’s very clear that you wouldn’t want to ship it to production.

That said…

You could ship something that’s behind an origin trial, but you’d have to make sure you’re putting safeguards in place. At the very least, you’d need to do feature detection. You certainly couldn’t use an experimental feature for anything mission critical …but you could use it as an enhancement.

And that is a pretty great way to think about all web features, experimental or otherwise. Don’t assume the feature will be supported. Use feature detection (or @supports in the case of CSS). Try to use the feature as an enhancement rather than a dependency.

If you treat all browser features as though they’re behind an origin trial, then suddenly the landscape of browser support becomes more navigable. Instead of looking at the support table for something on caniuse.com and thinking, “I wish more browsers supported this feature so that I could use it!”, you can instead think “I’m going to use this feature today, but treat it as an experimental feature.”

You can also do it for well-established features like querySelector, addEventListener, and geolocation. Instead of assuming that browser support is universal, it doesn’t hurt to take a more defensive approach. Assume nothing. Acknowledge and embrace unpredictability.

The debacle with vendor prefixes shows what happens if we treat experimental features as though they’re stable. So let’s flip that around. Let’s treat stable features as though they’re experimental. If you cultivate that mindset, your websites will be more robust and resilient.

It seems that some code that I wrote in Going Offline is haunted. It’s the trimCache function.

First, there was the issue of a typo. Or maybe it’s more of a brainfart than a typo, but either way, there’s a mistake in the syntax that was published in the book.

Now it turns out that there’s also a problem with my logic.

To recap, this is a function that takes two arguments: the name of a cache, and the maximum number of items that cache should hold.

function trimCache(cacheName, maxItems) {

First, we open up the cache:

caches.open(cacheName)
.then( cache => {

Then, we get the items (keys) in that cache:

cache.keys()
.then(keys => {

Now we compare the number of items (keys.length) to the maximum number of items allowed:

if (keys.length > maxItems) {

If there are too many items, delete the first item in the cache—that should be the oldest item:

cache.delete(keys[0])

And then run the function again:

.then(
    trimCache(cacheName, maxItems)
);

A-ha! See the problem?

Neither did I.

It turns out that, even though I’m using then, the function will be invoked immediately, instead of waiting until the first item has been deleted.

Trys helped me understand what was going on by making a useful analogy. You know when you use setTimeout, you can’t put a function—complete with parentheses—as the first argument?

window.setTimeout(doSomething(someValue), 1000);

In that example, doSomething(someValue) will be invoked immediately—not after 1000 milliseconds. Instead, you need to create an anonymous function like this:

window.setTimeout( function() {
    doSomething(someValue)
}, 1000);

Well, it’s the same in my trimCache function. Instead of this:

cache.delete(keys[0])
.then(
    trimCache(cacheName, maxItems)
);

I need to do this:

cache.delete(keys[0])
.then( function() {
    trimCache(cacheName, maxItems)
});

Or, if you prefer the more modern arrow function syntax:

cache.delete(keys[0])
.then( () => {
    trimCache(cacheName, maxItems)
});

Either way, I have to wrap the recursive function call in an anonymous function.

Here’s a gist with the updated trimCache function.

What’s annoying is that this mistake wasn’t throwing an error. Instead, it was causing a performance problem. I’m using this pattern right here on my own site, and whenever my cache of pages or images gets too big, the trimCaches function would get called …and then wouldn’t stop running.

I’m very glad that—witht the help of Trys at last week’s Homebrew Website Club Brighton—I was finally able to get to the bottom of this. If you’re using the trimCache function in your service worker, please update the code accordingly.

Management regrets the error.

When I was in Boston, speaking on a lunchtime panel with Rachel at An Event Apart, we took some questions from the audience about CSS grid. Inevitably, a question about browser support came up—specifically about support in Internet Explorer 11.

(Technically, you can use CSS grid in IE11—in fact it was the first browser to ship a version of grid—but the prefixed syntax is different to the standard and certain features are missing.)

Rachel gave a great balanced response, saying that you need to look at your site’s stats to determine whether it’s worth the investment of your time trying to make a grid work in IE11.

My response was blunter. I said I just don’t consider IE11 as a browser that supports grid.

Now, that might sound harsh, but what I meant was: you’re already dividing your visitors into browsers that support grid, and browsers that don’t …and you’re giving something to those browsers that don’t support grid. So I’m suggesting that IE11 falls into that category and should receive the layout you’re giving to browsers that don’t support grid …because really, IE11 doesn’t support grid: that’s the whole reason why the syntax is namespaced by -ms.

You could jump through hoops to try to get your grid layout working in IE11, as detailed in a three-part series on CSS Tricks, but at that point, the amount of effort you’re putting in negates the time-saving benefits of using CSS grid in the first place.

Frankly, the whole point of prefixed CSS is that is not used after a reasonable amount of time (originally, the idea was that it would not be used in production, but that didn’t last long). As we’ve moved away from prefixes to flags in browsers, I’m seeing the amount of prefixed properties dropping, and that’s very, very good. I’ve stopped using autoprefixer on new projects, and I’ve been able to remove it from some existing ones—please consider doing the same.

And when it comes to IE11, I’ll continue to categorise it as a browser that doesn’t support CSS grid. That doesn’t mean I’m abandoning users of IE11—far from it. It means I’m giving them the layout that’s appropriate for the browser they’re using.

Remember, websites do not need to look exactly the same in every browser.

Paul Yabsley wrote to let me know about an error in Going Offline. It’s rather embarrassing because it’s code that I’m using in the service worker for adactio.com but for some reason I messed it up in the book.

It’s the trimCache function in Chapter 7: Tidying Up. That’s the reusable piece of code that recursively reduces the number of items in a specified cache (cacheName) to a specified amount (maxItems). On page 95 and 96 I describe the process of creating the function which, in the book, ends up like this:

 function trimCache(cacheName, maxItems) {
   cacheName.open( cache => {
     cache.keys()
     .then( items => {
       if (items.length > maxItems) {
         cache.delete(items[0])
         .then(
           trimCache(cacheName, maxItems)
         ); // end delete then
       } // end if
     }); // end keys then
   }); // end open
 } // end function

See the problem? It’s right there at the start when I try to open the cache like this:

cacheName.open( cache => {

That won’t work. The open method only works on the caches object—I should be passing the name of the cache into the caches.open method. So the code should look like this:

caches.open( cacheName )
.then( cache => {

Everything else remains the same. The corrected trimCache function is here:

function trimCache(cacheName, maxItems) {
  caches.open(cacheName)
  .then( cache => {
    cache.keys()
    .then(items => {
      if (items.length > maxItems) {
        cache.delete(items[0])
        .then(
          trimCache(cacheName, maxItems)
        ); // end delete then
      } // end if
    }); // end keys then
  }); // end open then
} // end function

Sorry about that! I must’ve had some kind of brainfart when I was writing (and describing) that one line of code.

You may want to deface your copy of Going Offline by taking a pen to that code example. Normally I consider the practice of writing in books to be barbarism, but in this case …go for it.

Update: There was another error in the code for trimCache! Here’s the fix.

I’ve come to believe that the goal of any good framework should be to make itself unnecessary.

Brian said it explicitly of his PhoneGap project:

The ultimate purpose of PhoneGap is to cease to exist.

That makes total sense, especially if your code is a polyfill—those solutions are temporary by design. Autoprefixer is another good example of a piece of code that becomes less and less necessary over time.

But I think it’s equally true of any successful framework or library. If the framework becomes popular enough, it will inevitably end up influencing the standards process, thereby becoming dispensible.

jQuery is the classic example of this. There’s very little reason to use jQuery these days because you can accomplish so much with browser-native JavaScript. But the reason why you can accomplish so much without jQuery is because of jQuery. I don’t think we would have querySelector without jQuery. The library proved the need for the feature. The same is true for a whole load of DOM scripting features.

The same process is almost certain to occur with React—it’s a good bet there will be a standardised equivalent to the virtual DOM at some point.

When Google first unveiled AMP, its intentions weren’t clear to me. I hoped that it existed purely to make itself redundant:

As well as publishers creating AMP versions of their pages in order to appease Google, perhaps they will start to ask “Why can’t our regular pages be this fast?” By showing that there is life beyond big bloated invasive web pages, perhaps the AMP project will work as a demo of what the whole web could be.

Alas, as time has passed, that hope shows no signs of being fulfilled. If anything, I’ve noticed publishers using the existence of their AMP pages as a justification for just letting their “regular” pages put on weight.

Worse yet, the messaging from Google around AMP has shifted. Instead of pitching it as a format for creating parallel versions of your web pages, they’re now also extolling the virtues of having your AMP pages be the only version you publish:

In fact, AMP’s evolution has made it a viable solution to build entire websites.

On an episode of the Dev Mode podcast a while back, AMP was a hotly-debated topic. But even those defending AMP were doing so on the understanding that it was more a proof-of-concept than a long-term solution (and also that AMP is just for news stories—something else that Google are keen to change).

But now it’s clear that the Google AMP Project is being marketed more like a framework for the future: a collection of web components that prioritise performance …which is kind of odd, because that’s also what Google’s Polymer project is. The difference being that pages made with Polymer don’t get preferential treatment in Google’s search results. I can’t help but wonder how the Polymer team feels about AMP’s gradual pivot onto their territory.

If the AMP project existed in order to create a web where AMP was no longer needed, I think I could get behind it. But the more it’s positioned as the only viable solution to solving performance, the more uncomfortable I am with it.

Which, by the way, brings me to one of the most pernicious ideas around Google AMP—positioning anyone opposed to it as not caring about web performance. Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s precisely because performance on the web is so important that it deserves a long-term solution, co-created by all of us: not some commandents delivered to us from on-high by one organisation, enforced by preferential treatment by that organisation’s monopoly in search.

It’s the classic logical fallacy:

1. Performance! Something must be done!
2. AMP is something.
3. Now something has been done.

By marketing itself as the only viable solution to the web performance problem, I think the AMP project is doing itself a great disservice. If it positioned itself as an example to be emulated, I would welcome it.

I wish that AMP were being marketed more like a temporary polyfill. And as with any polyfill, I look forward to the day when AMP is no longer necesssary.

I want AMP to become extinct. I genuinely think that the Google AMP team should share that wish.

Alright! It’s time for the final talk of the day at An Event Apart Seattle (Special Edition). Jen is wrapping up a CSStastic afternoon with her talk Everything You Know About Web Design Just Changed. These are my notes…

Ready for another hour of layout in CSS? Well, Jen will be showing no code in this talk. She’s actually nervous about this particular talk. Is she really planning to say “Everything about web design just changed”? That sounds so clickbaity! But she really believes we’re at an inflection point. This may be the sixth such point in the history of the web. One of those points where everything changes and we swap out our techniques.

For the last few years, we’ve been saying that everything changed when mobile came along. But actually, the real fight has been going on for longer than that. It’s the battle between wanting art and dealing with how the web works.

There’s a seminal book called Creating Killer Websites by David Siegel from 1996. In it, he describes the first time he saw the same site in two different browsers. His reaction was panic. The web gave control to the user. David Siegel wanted more control. And that’s how we got spacer gifs and tables for layout.

What are the five major changes in the history of web design?

1. Simple HTML. There was only one kind of layout: flow layout. There’s no CSS, but the browser is still thinking of everything has having a box. Text takes up as much space as it needs. Images take up as much space as their size. This is flow. There wasn’t much you could do until tables came along. They were created for tabular content but abused for layouts. The “We need art!” crowd used what was available to them at the time. Lots of slicing and dicing.
2. Flash. It was hard to get HTML tables to work in multiple browsers. Flash seemed like an amazing chance to start over. And we could do things that were previously only possible in CD-ROMs. As a designer, you take an element and place it where you want to go on the stage (the UI tradition that goes all the way back to Xerox PARC). We made some crazy sites, explored a lot of possibilities, and got a lot of control. But the downside was the lack of accessibility. We went back to getting to grips with the web as its own medium. Jeffrey’s book, Designing With Web Standards, was a rallying cry to allow HTML to return to doing what it was meant to.
3. Fluid Layouts. This was a return to the way the web always behaved—content takes up as much room as it needs to. But this time there’s a certain amount of control over how things are laid out. Still, we pretended that nobody has screens smaller than 640 pixels or bigger than 1024 pixels. We still live with the idea of fluid columns today.
4. Fixed-Width Layouts. The “We need art!” crowd wanted more control than fluid layouts offered. We pretended that everyone’s screen was at least 640 pixels, or later 800 pixels, or later 1024 pixels.
5. Responsive Web Design. Unveiled by Ethan at An Event Apart Seattle in 2011: flexible grid; flexible images; media queries. It’s a return to fluid layouts, but the addition of media queries gives us more control. The idea of fluid image was a bit radical. Up until that point, we thought of images as always being their intrinsic size. But something Ethan said that day was “It’s not just about layout.” And it’s true. For the last eight years, it’s been about more than layout. You set out to redesign your website and end up redesigning your whole business. Responsive web design is, frankly, what the web is now.

But let’s talk about layout. What’s next? Intrinsic Web Design.

Why a new name? Why bother? Well, it was helpful to debate fluid vs. fixed, or table-based layouts: having words really helps. Over the past few years, Jen has needed a term for “responsive web design +”.

Responsive web design has flexible images. Intrinsic web design has flexible images …or fixed images. Whichever you want.

Responsive web design has a fluid columns. Intrinsic web design has fluid columns and rows.

Responsive web design uses media queries. Intrinsic web design doesn’t necessarily need them.

The name comes from words that have been floating in the ether. In Rachel’s talk, the words “sizing” and “intrinsic” came up a lot. This is about the nature of the web.

Let’s look at images specifically. Before responsive web design, images overflow their container if they are bigger than the container. Fluid images (as used in responsive web design) shrink and grow depending on the size of their container. You can also make images fluid in a vertical direction. If we make the image fluid vertically and horizontally, the image looks distorted. But now if we use object-fit: cover we can specify how we want the image to react.

Fixed or fluid? With grid layout, you can mix fixed and fluid. You can make a layout fluid until it hits a minimum size, at which point it stays fixed.

There are four stages of squishiness:

1. fixed
2. fr units (fluid)
3. minmax()(fluid until fixed)
4. auto (a return to flow)

That’s a powerful set of tools that may take us years to explore.

We can do truly two-dimensional layouts: rows and columns. Every one of those four stages of squishiness works for rows as well as columns. This means we can create intentional white space. Jen made a video about this and got the response that this was always possible, but it’s different now: it’s more intentional. You can set heights and widths.

We can have nested contexts now:

1. Flow
2. Flexbox (formatting context)
3. Grid (formatting context)
4. Multicolumn (formatting context)

Floats never created a new formatting context, which is why used clearfix. Now we don’t need hacks. You can mix and match, choosing the best layout tool for the job at hand. You can have a grid layout that has flexbox items within it. The Firefox dev tools allow you to inspect each layout type separately. You can use the nightly build to get the latest tools.

Then we’ve got ways to contract and expand content. We have more options now. For a while, we’ve had the option to squish and grow (e.g. with fluid images). Another is wrapping and reflowing (like we can do with text). Another option now is to add and remove whitespace. Maybe the content size doesn’t need to change; the whitespace shrinks and grows instead. An even more radical option now is to have things slide behind one another and overlap deliberately.

Sometimes you don’t even need to use media queries (meaning we’ve effectively got container queries). But we can still use media queries, as needed, to tweak the details.

So intrinsic web design is:

1. Fluid and fixed
2. Stages of squishiness
3. Truly two-dimensional layouts
4. Nested contexts
5. Expand and contract content
6. Media queries, as needed

We have a whole new sandbox that we can play in. You can find examples at labs.jensimmons.com.

See also:

• Torre’s notes on this talk.

Last Christmas I gave you my bug report. Well, more of a whinge really. Scott put together a much better bug report and test page:

When the meta viewport tag is set to content=”width=device-width,initial-scale=1”, or any value that allows user-scaling, changing the device to landscape orientation causes the page to scale larger than 1.0. As a result, a portion of the page is cropped off the right, and the user must double-tap (sometimes more than once) to get the page to zoom properly into view.

Yes, it’s the old orientation and scale bug in Mobile Safari.

I’m pleased to report that as of iOS version 6, this bug seems to have finally been squashed. Hallelujah!

Given the relatively rapid upgrade path for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad users, it won’t be long until we can remove our clever solutions for working around this problem.

Stand down, hackers, stand down. This bug has been taken care of.

South by Southwest has become a vast, sprawling festival with a preponderance of panels pitched at marketers, start-ups and people that use the words “social media” in their job title without irony. But there were also some great design and development talks if you looked for them.

Samantha gave a presentation on style tiles, which I unfortunately missed but I’ll be eagerly awaiting the release of the audio. I also missed some good meaty JavaScript talks but I did manage to make it along to Jen’s excellent introduction to HTML5 APIs.

Andy’s talk on CSS best practices was one of the best presentations I’ve ever seen. He did a fantastic job of tackling some really important topics. It’s a presentation (and a presenter) that deserves a wider audience, so if you’re involved in putting together the line-up for any front-end conferences, I highly recommend that you nab him.

Divya put together an absolutely killer panel called CSS.next, all about how CSS gets specced and shipped, and what’s coming down the line. All of the panelists were smart, articulate, and well-informed. The panel was very enlightening, as well as being thoroughly enjoyable.

And then there was the Browser Wars panel.

This is something of a SXSW tradition. Arun assembles a line-up of representatives from browser makers—Mozilla, Google, Microsoft, and Opera—and then peppers them with some hardball questions. Apple is invited to send a representative every year, and every year, Apple declines.

There was no shortage of contentious topics this year. The subject of Google Dart was raised (“Good luck with that,” said Brendan). There was also plenty of discussion about the recent DRM proposal submitted to the HTML working group. There was a disturbing level of agreement amongst all the panelists that some form of DRM for video was needed because, hey, that’s just the way things go…

As an aside, I must say I found the lack of imagination on display to be pretty disheartening. Two years ago, Chris was on the Browser Wars panel representing Microsoft, defending the EOT format because, hey, that’s just the way things go. Without some form of DRM, he argued, we couldn’t have fonts on the web. Well, the web found a way. Now Chris is representing Google but the argument remains the same. DRM, so the argument goes, is the only way we’ll get video on the web because that’s what the “rights holders” demand. And yet, if you are a photographer, no such special consideration is afforded to you. The img element has no DRM and people are managing just fine, thank you. Video, apparently, is a special case …just like fonts. ahem

Anyway…

The subject of vendor prefixes also came up. Specifically, the looming prospect of non-webkit browsers parsing -webkit prefixed properties was raised.

I saw a pattern amongst all three subjects: the DRM proposal, Dart, and browsers implementing another browser’s vendor prefix. All three proposals were made to address a genuine problem. The proposals all suffer from varying degrees of batshit craziness but they certainly galvanised a lot of discussion.

For example, Brendan said that while Google Dart may not stand a hope in hell of supplanting JavaScript, some of the ideas it contains may well end up influencing the development of ECMAScript.

Similarly, Mozilla’s plan for vendor-prefixing certainly caused all parties to admit the problem: the W3C was moving too slow; Apple should have submitted proprietary properties for standardisation sooner; Mozilla, Microsoft, and Opera should have been innovating faster; and web developers should have been treating vendor-prefixed properties as experimental features, not stable parts of a spec.

So the proposal to do something batshit crazy and implement -webkit-prefixed CSS properties has actually had some very positive effects …but there’s no reason to actually go ahead and do it!

I tried to make this point during the audience participation part of the panel, but it was like banging my head against a brick wall. Chaals kept repeating the problem case, but I wasn’t disputing the problem; I was trying to point out that the proposed solution wouldn’t fix the problem.

It was a classic case of the same kind of thinking we saw in the SOPA proposal:

1. Something must be done!
2. Implementing -webkit prefixes is something.
3. Something has been done.

The problem is that it won’t work. Adding “like Webkit” to the user-agent string will probably have much more of an effect and frankly, I don’t care if any of the browsers do that. At this point, a little bit more pissing into the bloated cesspool of user-agent strings is hardly going to matter. A browser’s user-agent string isn’t an identifier, it’s a reverse-chronological history of the web. Why not update the history booklet to include the current predilection amongst developers for Webkit browsers on mobile?

But implementing -webkit vendor prefixes? Pointless! If a developer is only building and testing their sites for one class of device or browser, simply implementing that browser’s prefixed CSS is just putting a band aid on a decapitation.

So I was kind of hoping that Mozilla would just come right out and say that maybe they wouldn’t actually go ahead and do this but hey, look at all the great discussion it generated (just like Dart, just like the DRM proposal). But sadly, no. Brendan categorically stated that the proposal was not presented in order to foment discussion. And in follow-up tweets, he wrote that he actually expected it to level the mobile browser playing field. That’s an admirably optimistic viewpoint but it’s sadly self-delusional.

And what will happen when implementing -webkit prefixes fails to level the playing field? We’ll be left with deliberately broken browsers.

Once something ships in a browser, it’s very, very hard to ever remove it. During the Dart discussion, Chris talked about the possibility of removing Dart from Chrome if developers don’t take to it. Turning to the Microsoft representative he asked rhetorically, “I mean, do you guys still ship VBScript?”

The answer?

“Yes.”

A year and a half ago, Eric wrote a great article in A List Apart called Prefix or Posthack. It’s a balanced look at vendor prefixes in CSS that concludes in their favour:

If the history of web standards has shown us anything, it’s that hacks will be necessary. By front-loading the hacks using vendor prefixes and enshrining them in the standards process, we can actually fix some of the potential problems with the process and possibly accelerate CSS development.

So the next time you find yourself grumbling about declaring the same thing four times, once for each browser, remember that the pain is temporary. It’s a little like a vaccine—the shot hurts now, true, but it’s really not that bad in comparison to the disease it prevents.

Henri disagrees. He wrote a post called Vendor Prefixes Are Hurting the Web:

In practice, vendor prefixes lead to a situation where Web author have to say the same thing in a different way to each browser. That’s the antithesis of having Web standards. Standards should enable authors to write to a standard and have it work in implementations from multiple vendors.

Daniel Glazman wrote a point-by-point rebuttal to Henri’s post called CSS vendor prefixes, an answer to Henri Sivonen that’s well worth a read. Alex also wrote a counter-argument to Henri’s post called Vendor Prefixes Are A Rousing Success that echoes some of the points Eric made in his ALA article:

The standards process needs to lag implementations, which means that we need spaces for implementations to lead in. CSS vendor prefixes are one of the few shining examples of this working in practice.

Alex’s co-worker Paul disagrees. He recently wrote Vendor Prefixes Are Not Developer-friendly:

1. Prefixes are not developer-friendly.
2. Recent features would have been in a much better state without prefixes.
3. Implementor maneuverability is not hampered without prefixes.

All of this would have remained a fairly academic discussion but for a bombshell dropped by Tantek at a face-to-face meeting of the CSS Working Group in Paris:

At this point we’re trying to figure out which and how many -webkit- prefix properties to actually implement support for in Mozilla.

The superficial issue is that web developers have been implementing -webkit- properties without then adding the non-prefixed standardised version (and without adding the corresponding prefixes of other vendors). The more fundamental problem is that while vendor prefixes were intended to introduce experimental features until those features became standardised, the reality is that the prefixed version ends up being supported in perpetuity. Nobody is happy about this situation but that’s the unfortunate reality.

Among the unhappy voices are:

• Bruce who wrote On the Vendor Prefixes Problem,
• Aaron who wrote This Must Not Happen!,
• Remy who wrote Vendor Prefixes — about to go south,
• Rachel who wrote a Call for action on Vendor Prefixes on the WaSP blog, and
• Daniel once more entered the fray, writing Call For Action: The Open Web Needs You Now.

Once again, Eric sought to bring clarity to the situation in the form of an article on A List Apart, this time publishing an interview with Tantek. Alex also popped up again, writing a post called Misdirection which addresses what he feels are some fundamental assumptions being made in the interview.

Finally, Mozilla engineer Robert O’Callahan—who I chatted with briefly at Kiwi Foo Camp about the vendor prefix situation—wrote about Alternatives To Supporting -webkit Prefixes In Other Engines in which he makes clear that evangelism efforts like Christian’s, while entirely laudable, aren’t a realistic solution to the problem.

It’s all a bit of a mess really, with lots of angry finger-pointing: at Apple, at Mozilla, at web developers, at the W3C…

My own feelings match those of Eric, who wrote:

I’d love to be proven wrong, but I have to assume the vendors will push ahead with this regardless. … I don’t mean to denigrate or undermine any of the efforts I mentioned before—they’re absolutely worth doing even if every non-WebKit browser starts supporting -webkit- properties next week. If nothing else, it will serve as evidence of your commitment to professional craftsmanship.

In a comment on Roger’s post about fixed and liquid layouts, Cameron wrote:

This issue seems to generate a heated debate every time it’s mentioned. I imagine one could pen an article with the headline “Fluid or fixed?” and nothing else, and yet dozens of comments would inevitably appear.

But rather than use that title, I couldn’t resist borrowing a pun from Andy, prompted by a post from Scrivs called What Resolution Will You Design for in 2007? (a classic example of the fallacy of many questions).

Now, firstly, we need to draw a distinction between monitor size and browser size. In other words, the difference between screen resolution and the viewport size:

• Browser size does matter - Actual numbers
• Actual Browser Sizes
• The ridiculous discussion about monitor sizes and screen resolutions
• The importance of window-width
• Design for Browser Size — Not Screen Size

There’s a real danger in thinking that “the numbers speak for themselves.” Numbers don’t speak for themselves; numbers need to be interpreted.

The numbers clearly show that monitor sizes and resolutions are getting bigger. The most common interpretation of that is more and more people have bigger displays. But an equally valid interpretation of the numbers is the range of displays is bigger than ever. It’s a subtle but important distinction. One interpretation focuses solely on the size of the highest numbers; the other interpretation focuses on the range of all the numbers.

The way I see it, the range is growing at both ends of the spectrum. Yes, desktop monitors are getting wider (though that doesn’t mean that viewports get any wider above a certain size) but handheld and gaming devices are likely to remain at the lower end of the scale. The Wii, for example, has a resolution of 640 x 480.

Mind you, the iPhone turns the whole question on its head with its scalable browsing. At MacWorld, Steve Jobs demonstrated this by visiting the New York Times, an unashamedly wide fixed-width website. On the Apple site, Wikipedia—a liquid layout— is shown fitting nicely on the display. The iPhone deals with both. Still, rather than letting my liquid layouts scale down to the iPhone’s width, I should probably start putting a min-width value on the body element.

Speaking of which…

A common argument against using liquid layouts is the issue of line lengths. On the face of it, this seems like a valid argument. Readability is supremely important and nobody likes over-long line lengths. But it’s not quite as simple as that when it comes to readability on screen compared to print, as Richard noted:

Surprisingly, I find short line lengths tiresome on screen; I don’t really subscribe to the empirical prescription of 7–10 words per line for comfortable reading. Most novels have 10–15 words per line and I think the upper region of that range is more appropriate for screen.

In any case, the idea that liquid layouts automatically means long line lengths on large screens is, I feel, a misconception. The problem is that a lot of the examples of liquid layouts aren’t very good and line lengths do expand without limit. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

In my opinion, the most important addition to Internet Explorer 7 is the max-width property. It means that we can now really start to look at creating fluid layouts within defined parameters, as demonstrated by Cameron in Andy’s book. In fact, I think we’re just scratching the surface of what’s possible in creating seamless adaptive layouts (and, more importantly, seamless adaptive page elements) using the dual power of max-width and min-width.

That still leaves Internet Explorer 6 and below. Should they get unbounded fluid layouts or should they get a fixed width fallback? The second is certainly an option using conditional comments, which is the Microsoft-approved way of dealing with rendering inconsistencies. I think that the lack of support for max-width certainly falls into that category. Call it transcending CSS if you will; I call it routing around damage on the designer’s network.

I want to hear what you have to say… if you’ve got something new to say. Let’s not just rehash the same old arguments that would inevitably appear had I simply asked “Fluid or fixed?”

Technorati has been redesigned, or realigned if you prefer. It’s gone a bit gradient happy but overall, it’s quite a pleasing visual aesthetic.

For some reason though, they’ve chosen to lock the pages into a fixed width of 1024 pixels.

Now, I understand the reasoning behind fixed-width layouts. I can see the justification for wide fixed-width layouts on content-heavy sites like A List Apart (even if I disagree with it). But forcing users of what is fundamentally a web app to set their browser to a certain width seems counterproductive to me.

The content on Technorati is user-generated. Usually, that user is me. It has my favourites, my watchlist, and my search terms. I should be able to interact with that content in my way.

This is something that, as with so many things, del.icio.us gets just right. Upcoming is on the right track too. These sites allow me to interact with my data without putting me in a straitjacket.

Flickr is still avowedly fixed but the image-based, rather than text-based, nature of the data I store there makes this somewhat understandable.

Now, don’t misconstrue this as a tirade against 1024 pixel wide layouts. The problem would still exist in an 800 pixel wide design. Choosing an arbitrary number of pixels in which to serve up user-generated content is the issue here. On the one hand, Technorati is a very Web 2.0 sort of site, based on user-generated distributed content and collective wisdom. On the other hand, its visual design is grounded in a very Web 1.0 idea of top-down control and inflexibility.

I like Technorati a lot. It’s come on in leaps and bounds in the past couple of years. I’d like to use it every day. I’m even willing to put up with the oversize ads. But I resent the feeling that I should adjust my browsing environment to the needs of the site, rather than the other way around.