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Comment by dictum | Hacker News Reader

I recently found out that the sidebar menus on pages within https://developers.google.com/web don't work with JS off (usually a trivial thing: show sub-items by default and hide them with JS). Almost every Alphabet website has something like that.

So yes, minor anecdote, and I genuinely appreciate the hundreds of Google employees who really help the Web and share useful knowledge (and don't lead developers into using techniques best suited for billion-user websites, as FB often does) but I'll reserve to right to side-eye anything Google says.

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Also the site claims to about “web fundamentals”, but the content pushed out are all articles about cutting edge, experimental features in Chrome. There’s nothing wrong with documenting new features in your browser, but calling it fundamental is fundamentally misleading.

Not working with JS disabled is bad, but not working on a major modern browser is ridiculous.

Safari is the new IE8.

Every web dev I know bitches about it.

It's not. I'm a web developer and it's my browser of choice.

Every bad web dev bitches about it.

There's nothing about Safari that makes it "the new IE8". Ironically, the very same HN that bemoans every new thing as "why should devs jump onto this shiny new things, just slow down already" criticises Safari for not jumping onto every new thing.

Ironically, the very same HN that bemoans every new thing as "why should devs jump onto this shiny new things, just slow down already" criticises Safari for not jumping onto every new thing.

HN is quite diverse and I'm pretty sure those are two disjoint sets of users. (I'm in the former group myself --- not a fan of presenting information in such a way as to decrease its accessibility while also increasing resource usage.)

I bet I could make those accordion sections work in all browsers going back to IE5 without much effort, and use nothing near 120KB of JS to do it... but no, most "modern web devs" would rather pile on the bloat of their libraries and "best practices" to make something that works only in the very latest version of the one browser they personally use.

> I bet I could make those accordion sections work in all browsers going back to IE5 without much effort, and use nothing near 120KB of JS to do it.

<summary>/<details> tags with JS polyfill is all you'd need.

https://caniuse.com/#search=summary

Your post shows the big difference in mentality that's partly responsible for why we see so many broken sites --- I haven't ever used those tags before and would just go for plain old DOM style manipulation with JS (which has been around for a very long time), whereas you started with something much newer and took backwards-compatibility as an afterthought to be added on. Your solution requires less initial effort (providing you knew about the new tags) but then additional effort to work on older browsers --- that might not even be done --- whereas my solution may take a little more effort initially, but then naturally doesn't need any further considerations for backwards-compatibility.

My mentality is to make the website usable without JS for most people (with the reasonable effort of installing FF or Chrome at most), then use as simple and compatible JS as possible if needed. Thus, old-style DOM fiddling isn't the first choice - and if we're talking very old browsers, it was also tricky to get right due to all the incompatibilities.

Why you think something would be broken when a polyfill is used as fallback, I don't know.

Why would anyone use an older browser? (Other than IE in old firms - but this is probably becoming rarer and rarer) I guess everyone should upgrade their browser regularly, at least to get security upgrades

It's not so much jumping on new things, it's implementing accepted features which has slowed down very considerably since the Blink fork.

Google was really carrying a big part of the webkit development.

> it's implementing accepted features

Define "accepted". Hastily implemented and shoved down everyone's throat by Chrome doesn't mean "accepted".

> Google was really carrying a big part of the webkit development.

Nope. Google is dominating the development space with utter disregard for public/dev opinion.

It's support for video codecs is pretty limited, and has been for a long time, but I think you're right about most of the other things being very new "standards".

It's annoying that it throws exceptions when you try to access LocalStorage in Private Browsing.

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