the decline of standards/evolution and devolution
I already hinted at it in my list of smelly web development stuff of 2009, but the decline of standards is ready to become a big issue for us front-end people in 2010. We've been fighting the fight for web standards for a long time now, but it seems that impatience and overeager attitudes are taking over. My take on the issue.
standards huh
A web standard is a trusted, solid, supported and unique solution to a particular problem. When people are talking about "web standards", they mean the collection of all separate standards involving front-end development. This might sound like a somewhat trivial point to make, but there's a good reason to have it out of the way.
The plural of the word "standard" often indicates that there isn't really a true standard to begin with. A standard can only be a true standard if it is unique in its implementation. Multiple standards can exist for fixing a particular problem, though resulting in a weaker and less pure use of the term. The existence of multiple standards is what we've been fighting all these years, trying to approach a "one problem - one solution" situation.
2009 turned out to be a pretty bad year for web standards.
browsers and evolution
In 2009 five big browser vendors ruled the world of web. Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera are divided among four different families of rendering engines (though in reality Chrome is just as different from Safari as the rest). Each of these families released different versions of their browsers resulting in a pretty wide area of browsers to support. This growth will probably continue in 2010, if not by as much as in 2009.
There is no real browser war like there was before, but it is obvious that these people are competing with each other. Implementation of the newest development techniques (css3 and html5) became a big thing again, luring the eager and bored front-end developer to start experimenting with these new options. This made 2009 a pretty interesting year, though also one of large frustrations.
was it progressive enhancement or graceful degradation?
Two other important concepts are progressive enhancement and graceful degradation. Both deal with catering for browser-specific audiences, making sure each and every person gets the full functional experience, but also providing the best possible solution for each separate browser version. Combined with the wild growth of browser versions over the year, this has made our job a lot more complex.
Certain new techniques are "available" to us, today. We can start using html5, we can do rounded corners in css, we can use web fonts and natively embed video. All these techniques feature a lot of "if"s and "but"s with different implementations for specific browser families and versions. If you want to use web fonts, you have to provide four (4!) different kind of font files and a pile of css for it to work. Go figure.
Rounded corners feature a similar problem. None of the browsers today follow the official standard (which doesn't even exist yet). There's a syntax difference between Safari/Chrome and Firefox, a rendering difference between Chrome and Firefox/Safari, no support for Opera (and no way to fix it) and a fallback method for IE. How terrible does that sound?
2010 and how to deal with it
Let's face it. IE will be lagging behind for quite some time. IE6 will still be there by the end of 2010, so how are we as front-end developers going to deal with these browsers, especially when 2010 will undoubtedly bring his own share of innovations for newer browser versions (a good friend of mine showed me an article on html5 forms, great stuff).
Adopting a new technique is doable, but adopting all these new techniques is just too demanding for commercial projects. Especially when we're still providing the time-consuming fallback methods which also work in newer browsers. Sure, designing for the future is a good thing, but not at twice the cost for a simple website. For example, it is perfectly possible to do rounded corners with (almost-)css3 for Firefox and Safari, leave Opera users in the cold (though the new version of Opera will support it) and provide images for IE users.
This is indeed faster for modern browsers (which are faster already) but a tad slower for IE (which needs to load the base css and the IE specific css). And the image solution still yields better results in Safari and Opera. So why go through the extra trouble to provide slightly faster (but not-standard) code for Firefox and Safari?
conclusion
If you look back at the hottest techniques of 2009, you'll see that almost all of them feature fallback methods and require more than one true standard to work. If you want to use web fonts, you have to stick to a different standard for each browser family. This is simply wrong, but on the other hand web fonts beat Cufon and sIFR to a pulp.
I'm still not sure how much I should adopt from these new methods. I'm eager to use new technologies. Ones that work faster, that are more logical and indicate the way of the future. But I also think it might be better to wait until they turn into a respectable standard before using them in any commercial project. It's not an easy choice to make, certainly while others are jumping on the boat already, gaining experience in what might be the techniques of tomorrow.
A very tough decision if you ask me. Opinions and input is always welcome!
Comments
Rob Hofker
I think that such an approach will let you wait until almost forever. I simply use features like rounded corners (yes, with double syntax) and simply don't care that browsers like IE have square boxes. One day IE will catch up and the only change I will make sometime in the future is that I will start using the 'official syntax' and drop the browser specific prefixes.
Waiting for all the major browsers to catch up will prevent any progress. (I might misinterpret your sentiment.)
On top of that I think that many of the upcoming features in the standards are very useful and will give many new possibilities in developing web applications.
Niels Matthijs
If the effect of a rounded corner is so minimal that it can be left off just as well, you should probably wonder why it is there in the first place.
For many commercial websites IE stats are still well above 60%. To deny such a large percentage of increased quality of design is a pretty big decision. If it were my website you were making, you'd be fired right away.
That doesn't mean I don't understand where you're coming from. I wish it were all that simple, but the reality is pretty different.
Patrik
I have to agree with Rob. We have passed the times when everything had to took exactly the same in all browsers. There can be more the "one" design and selling this idea to our clients is not hard since the arguments are rock solid. I'd say 90% of the would accept these arguments without blinking (from my experience).
The more and the faster we take these "quasi standards" to our real work, the faster will the standards development- and implementation process go.
To spin of this article, a design can look awesome with and without rounded corners so the implementation of them both can most certainly work. Sure, our work won't validate but in this case I see it like this; If you want to reach your goal (the future) then you'll have to sacrifice something.
I'd say go for it, the time for Mr Nice Guy has passed! :)
Niels Matthijs
But looking at your own site (stated as a wip, but still), it appears in IE6 as if it was hit by a hurricane. If anyone hits it using that browser, I'm sure they'll think twice about hiring you.
I agree, but it's not really about "what works", but "what works best". Your site boasts no rounded corners in Opera. It still looks clean and correct, on the other hand it's a bit boring and safe.
Anyway, you guys are picking on the rounded corners now, but what about using html5 (completely messes up FF2 and all IEs without js support), web-fonts (what standard?) and embedded video?
Progressive enhancement is one thing. It's making a site better for newer browsers in ways that can't be done for older browsers. But neglecting to bring older browsers up to quality where possible still sounds a lot like a sub-par job to me.
Patrik
How lucky for me I'm not using this one in my portfolio. As stated it's about HTML5 and CSS3 for testing purpose and not about CSS3 + techniques to mimic them with CSS2 and graphics. With that being said, IE is not and will not be supported for a long time... but you're right, as soon as I find a little time for it, I'm closing it down for those browsers.
Elyas
Hi Niels
I am a bit more optimistic about the situation. I think that the dominance of a few browsers has held back standards, because the market demanded that you conform to them, and not vice versa.
With the addition of the extra browsers over the last few years, and the reduction of the dominance of IE, the need to capture a market of users (and developers first) is going to be key. I think that it will be a slow death for any browser not liked by the developers, and then the market. What better way to be liked than to be standardised? Compete for users/developers via extras, such as FF does with its plugins. Yes IE is still prevalent (and should not be ignored in any way), but i think that as applications move to the web that the corporate world will catch up eventually with everyone else, and move away from it. The only thing IE is good for, is for being the lowest common denominator when it comes to front end development. Make it work in IE first, then the rest is generally easy.
It might not be evident immediately, but i do believe that it will play out like that. The more players there are in the game the better it is for standards i think.
Niels Matthijs
Sounds an awful lot like the days of "optimized for xxx browser" and "download xxx browser to view this website" to me? Such sentiments are exactly the reason why I wrote this article. I'm not a big fan of history, but let's remember the faults from our past.
I wonder. Looking at the rounded corners implementation again, it still sucks. Not only the pixelated corners in Chrome, or the lack of support in Opera, but also the fact that inner content is still spilling out of the roundings (in both Safari and Firefox). I wonder if adding pre-standards to browsers is actually helping the standard itself and I fear that "it kinda works" will result to a certain form of laziness among browser vendors. To me, the border-radius is still buggy and experimental. Much like how we complain about bad css implementations in IE6 today.
Patrik
Yes Niels, I could not agree more. And I think that you and I are on the same page here. The reason for my statement is pretty obvious, it's a playground served for testing future webstandards. With that being said, I'm sorry to say, IE can not participate. And judging from the visitor statistics only 1% of the visitors use IE (6% using Safari on iPhone! :) ).
Based on this I'd prefer to feed them at least the content without extra.
My best guess is that my audience knows what browser to use since they are interested in what it is about. Since I work only with clients in the Corporate section, I'm sure as hell not practicing these ides with them.
Rob Crowther
While I agree that this is something to avoid in the general case, I think there are some 'commercial' cases today where it is worthwhile using these new standards, just because of the user market you're expecting. For example: websites targeted at iPhone/Android users; the Firefox Add-Ons site.
It works properly in Safari as long as you specify
overflow: hidden- it's a defect in Firefox (and the Opera 10.50 alpha, I assume) that this doesn't work.I think the fact that it's out there for us to use and experiment with is good for the standard in the long run, it's also good that the experience gained from writing code to implement the standard has a chance to feed back into the standards process before things get finalised and ensure everything is practical.
From a development point of view, I suspect that maintaining a 'safe' code stream without any of this experimental stuff in it as well as the 'experimental' build would be too much work and would reduce momentum in developing these things.
Niels Matthijs
So if you're running IE and you want to check out which add-ons would be interesting enough to make the switch, you'll be served a defect site? ;)
Not really, since the overflow:hidden solution is not agreed to (and rightfully so). It would be horrid if we had to specify an overflow:hidden on a box simply because an inner background shouldn't spill over the rounded corners. This would mean that whatever child element present couldn't be positioned outside of the parent box because of a simple graphic thingy.
From what I've heard, they're still looking into a good solutions for this particular problem. Applying the overflow:hidden is a crappy hack to make it work in Safari. These are the things that actually scare me a little.
True enough, I'm just wondering if it has a place in commercial project at this time. The user feedback is incredibly useful indeed, but I think it's best to keep the testing out of any commercial products.
hank
The fact that many commercial sites are already adopting techniques that work reliably to enhance user experience ("standardised" or not), coupled with a growing disillusionment with the politics within the W3C, means that the purists in the crowd will be left behind, as was anyone in a competitive design/development space who waited for the W3C to agree on CSS, JavaScript, etc., back in the mid 90s. Also not a pretty time - but when has it ever been easy?
But yes, as for the standards themselves, not such a great year, but we can, for a large part, thank the "'Pay To Play' combatants that fund the W3C" for that.
I don't really see your point about IE6 in response to Patrik's comment. I really think that I wouldn't want to work for someone if they were using IE6 as their browser of choice - it's now 9 years old and surpassed by two newer versions. Do you completely support IE 5.5? (It doesn't appear so, and why should you?) - IE6 is only a concern of mine if it's a concern for my clients' audience, and I think if I was required to deliver complete visual and performance consistency for IE6, it would come at the expense of the user experience in all browsers.