The Unwelcome Return of “Best Viewed With Internet Explorer”
technologizer.com
technologizer.com
I read an article a while back (anyone have a link?) that argued that "best viewed with" helped push browsers and the web forward tremendously. IE 9 is evidence that it's happening again.
HTML5 could really use feature publication — if authors could easily detect support for next-generation features (`if(!document.support.canvas){ tellUserAboutNewBrowsers(); }`), they might be less likely to lock out browsers by name.
Guides like yours (and Modernizr) are a case for browsers to make feature detection available through a Modernizr-like API.
We're having to get very, very creative to detect support for some features (e.g. writing data to an <input> and seeing if it sticks — it took a while before someone, Mike Taylor, iirc, figured that one out), and we're trusting that every new feature will be indirectly, accidentally detectable.
I'd much rather there was a standard way for a browser to say, "yep, I support this".
Granted, most of them are just "look what can be done with awesome javascript" but still :/