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Comment by ashitlerferad | Hacker News Reader

I wish progressive enhancement were more popular, but it is probably too late for anyone to ever care about it.

Well anyone who tries to access a slow loading page cares. As does anyone trying to use a page that misbehaves because over-aggressive javascript taking control in unhelpful ways cares. Anyone who's phone runs out of battery because some script is in a crazy loop cares.

They might know know or care what the technical reasons or solutions are. That's supposed to be our job.

I care about it but I just feel so befuddled by CSS that I don't know where I would begin to learn to do it. I've been hoping that I could find somewhere that teaches a mental model of layout which doesn't feel like playing whack-a-mole. However, I've spent 9 years of using HTML+CSS, had multiple discussions with fellow engineers, and even asked an MDN technical writer. Everything I've seen tells me that, "yep, CSS is just like that."

And so getting rid of JavaScript as a tool to make things work just doesn't make sense.

Hopefully flexbox becomes more prolific.

Sorry, but 9 years are definitely enough to learn CSS. If that is true, you have experienced IE6, whose broken implementation helped nicely to understand the underlying models.

No, he's right. The browser incompatibilities are incredible. The devil lies in the subtle things. Relative spacing and heights, absolute positions, divs that have to line up, etc. As soon as you require precision on all browsers, it becomes a nightmare. And a decade of HTML+CSS experience changes nothing about that, unless you only go for the most simplistic website imaginable.

The only real difference between Chrome and Firefox I notice regularly these days are subpixel rounding, input + button positioning in Firefox and styling of stuff like checkboxes, selects or radio buttons.

It is a pita, a few weeks ago I implemented a responsive design for a wine website created from the company's print agency, who just vomitted layers upon layers of images on the thing. Zero whitespace. Still it is nothing like it was 10 years ago. IE6 with its float bug simply destroyed the whole layout. Now it is more like "this button is 2px off in Firefox" or "here is some whitespace in chrome".

Just a few days ago, I noticed a bug in IE11 that destroyed a layout of a site of mine that used absolute position on a div. It worked in Chrome, Firefox, Edge and on mobile browsers. Things break just like in the 90's unless you constrain yourself to a very small set of commands and topologies that are guaranteed to work.

> As soon as you require precision on all browsers, it becomes a nightmare.

Don't do that then. Seriously, browsers aren't meant to provide bit-for-bit precision. Really, they can't: your page will be viewed on phones, on phablets, on tablets, on laptops, on desktops, on giant wall-screens; it will be viewed in colour, in black-and-white, in high-contrast palettes; it will be viewed with the same fonts you have installed, and without them and in monospace; it will be read aloud; it will be copy-pasted; it will be saved as plain text or as HTML.

Just … don't do that. Resist the impulse to do everything one browser or two browsers will let you get away with; limit yourself to what works on all browsers.

Maybe if I had focused on just HTML+CSS, but alongside going to university and studying/working with other more predictable things like page tables or Django...nope.

Well, not anyone, we care :) Part of the reason I wrote this was to provide some ammo for people that want to go down this path for the right reasons, but don’t know how to argue for it.

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