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Comment by stupidcar | Hacker News Reader

And yet there is still no way in CSS to, say, freeze a table header and make the body scrollable. Or freeze one column and make the rest scrollable.

For all its advances, the web platform is still incredibly primitive in some areas.

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You mean position: sticky? [1] Yeah, that took way too long, leading to horrible JS implementations, but it's there now.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/position#St...

I can't wait for that to be supported but MS Edge currently doesn't support it (though it's under consideration).

With an ever-declining IE/Edge market share, I usually rely on the principle of progressive enhancement and accept that certain non-essential features will only be available to users of modern web browsers (unless, of course, a specific project has an unusually high number of IE/Edge users, e.g. intranet applications).

Declining, but still non-trivial.

We dropped IE10 support when we stopped doing IE9 a year or so ago because they both had similarly insignificant numbers, and the opportunity cost of supporting them was too high.

IE11/Edge are also showing fairly similar numbers, which suggests edge uptake is slow, but even factoring in the extra hours, the bugs they generate (usually weird flex issues in both cases) we still effectively make more money by supporting them than not.

Yeah, relying on progressive enhancement is obviously only viable when we talk about nice-to-have features. Sticky headers will often fall into this category.

There's a ton of missing stuff for even the simplest of applications really, even basic paging controls. Eg. you can present <title>...</title>, <link rel=next ...> and <link rel=previous ...> to search engines, but you typically can't pull these values into your content for display. Technically you can overwrite user agent styles on head elements ([1]; just checked this still works), but it isn't rendered as link/has no link action on Chrome, and isn't rendered at all on IE 10 and lower.

I mean, these features are as basic and RESTful as it gets.

[1]: https://mathiasbynens.be/notes/css-hidden-elements

So do it with frames, like I remember doing in about 2002?

That's not going to work for e.g. a table that is part of your content.

Here's an example of a 2000s era page with a table about midway down with its own scrolling: http://www.ibacanada.com/site.jsp?siteID=ON001

Does this not work on some modern browsers out there?

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