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Comment by veosotano | Hacker News Reader

You're right: HTML is going to stay with us for a long, long time. This is not about eliminating it, but to try something new as an alternative.

It's not XML with vector shapes, that's exactly what SVG is. Vector shapes would live all inside HSS, where you could reuse them, style them, give them flexible sizes, apply effects, etc...

Once flexbox, grids and calc come out as official specs, you'll still have to wait until all browsers implements them, and then wait again until enough users update. You'll probably have to do an old-style layout as well anyway, because there are always users with older browsers out there, and it's not as easy as with rounded corners, where if they aren't there it doesn't matter. This would break your entire page...

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Once flexbox, grids and calc come out as official specs, you'll still have to wait until all browsers implements them, and then wait again until enough users update

How would the situation be any different for AXR?

The plan is to make the rendering engine an auto-updateable library, that's independent of the browser's release schedule. Thus, users would stay current faster.

On the other hand, there will be a versioning system, so that authors can specify what version of the technology they are targeting. So if the spec changes, compatibility modules can be created akin to how Adobe apps open documents differently if they are CS3 or CS5 documents, interpreting them according to what version they are.

Usually, layers can be built with new features, where only the very basic aspects of your design require a certain feature set, while others can be optional. In some scenarios, the user will have an outdated system and the author has REQUIRED a higher version than what is installed. Then a built-in prompt to update could be displayed, maybe with an option to view anyways, with the knowledge that it may render incorrectly.

Long story short, there are many things that can be done, and we certainly will learn a lot along the way, but I think we should definitely try.

This sounds like something we already have. I don't want this to sound confrontational, since I know the F-word is viewed as kind of "dirty" around here, but how is what you're proposing substantially different from Flash?

Well for starters its open source instead of proprietary. I think that already deserves some respect on its own.

Then, this is based on doing websites in the web standards spirit of using plain-text files, where multiple components are linked together, and having the semantic content (XML) separated from the presentation (HSS).

I mean, we like the concept of HTML+CSS, but we would like to see many of its flaws and shortcomings corrected.

While throughout history HTML and CSS was designed so it would always fallback correctly, because in practice browser vendors did not always fully comply with the specs, it doesn't. For example, Netscape 4 had poor CSS support that often produced worse results than if CSS support did not exist, and even IE3 for example treated unknown font size units as px. Not to mention the IE vs CSS box model.

To be honest, I think the browser support picture is changing. An increasing number of people are developing apps where they have some idea of what their target audience is like. Greater than 40% of the browsing public is now using Firefox, Chrome or Safari.

Flexbox is already in that bundle of browsers (and it rocks :)

calc is in IE9+ and Firefox.

Chrome and Firefox are in autoupdating very short release cycles (or, at least, Firefox is getting there rapidly).

I think the ideas in HSS are interesting, and I understand the motivation. But, the world is rapidly changing. Not everyone is going to be able to support the latest standards in their apps, but I think we're moving past the point where most developers will need to support a 10 year old browser. Time will tell!

(obDisclaimer: I'm a Mozillian)

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