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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

>Sometimes I wonder how the web got here with the amount of kludge that we have to carry.

Really? Um, MS led the way with IE6 and all of the baggage they brought. Google took the mantle with Chrome. Ultimately, it is the browser vendors and their "interpretations" on how to handle things. Rather than working with the governing bodies (yes, they are slow), they forged ahead with their own implementations and forced everyone to follow. No browser is perfect, but the travesty that IE left us with should have been the glaring example of what not to do, but yet Google went and did it again.

The internet is nothing without the browsers. If the browsers didn't do bad things, we'd be in a lot better situation.

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IE6 also brought us AJAX, so there is something to be said for browser vendors implementing experimental features on their own.

The difference between nice and awful, of course, is when developers and vendors treat such features as a given without providing graceful degradation (or progressive enhancement, if you prefer) for users of other browsers.

Sure, AJAX is cool. However, devs would not be allowed to release into the wild if the experimental features were not availalable in released browsers. That whole -strict, -transitional type stuff is just another example. Extreme specific personal reco would be to only allow experimental features available to devs that must compile their own browser from source. this would prevent the vast majority of users from ever seeing those experimental features in the wild. Devs could still dev against and find the bugs, but they would also be less willing to make the experimental features requirements on their product.

That isn't remotely the case. Plenty of experimental / one-vendor features have been released and later received wider adoption without fundamentally breaking the user's experience.

I.e. before we had indexeddb, there was websql. The whole PWA slew of features (I.e. service workers) can and are used without breaking user experience.

There can be bad implementations too- youtube's awful performance due to their early version of the web component spec comes to mind- but these features arent really akin to the olden days of ActivX / IE dominance, since they are single purpose and not opening up an entire foreign interface.

The standard and governing bodies has no right to demand anything. The internet is not a democracy. If they want something put the money where their mouth is. Until W3C ships their own browser engine and gets it into the hands of customers, relevance is nothing more than a nice-to-have.

There are no members of the W3C other than browser (and web-server) manufacturers. When the members of the W3C decide on something, that’s the browser manufacturers deciding on that thing.

The real question, I suppose, is whether the people who interact with the W3C/WHATWG/etc. have decision-making power within the organizations they nominally represent. If not, then these bodies are kind of like the UN: nominally a place for treaties to be made, but in practice a place for ambassadors to glad-hand one-another while their leaders ignore the decisions they make.

You seriously want google to be defining what the internet is given their current and past activities and abuses? There is no way that could ever be a good thing. If they ever do expect a 50% carve out for targeted ad technologies.

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