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Comment by jimvdv | Hacker News Reader

Not updating your browser will net you tons of exploitable vulnerabilities.

How do you expect things to ever change if no one ever updates? Certainly even if you decide to lean towards maximum support it’s still a positive these features are being introduced so you can use them in 10 years.

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> How do you expect things to ever change if no one ever updates?

Maybe things should stop changing.

We don't really need ten new CSS attributes every year. Things work. The elegant solution is to announce the project is done. That would bring some much-needed stability. Then we can focus on keeping things working.

The issue with this is that the browser is the cross-playing operating system, the VM that runs webapps. But we treat the platform like an evolving document format. If we want to declare it complete, we need to make it extensible so we can have a stable core without freezing capabilities. I foresee all of this CSS/HTML stuff as eventually being declared a sort of legacy format and adding a standard way to ship pluggable rendering engines/language runtimes. WASM is one step in that direction. There are custom rendering/layout engines now, but they basically have to render to canvas and lose a lot of performance and platform integration. Proper official support for such engines with hooks into accessibility features and the like could close that gap. Of course, then you have every website shipping a while OS userland for every pageload, kinda like containers on servers, but that overhead could probably be mitigated with some caching of tagged dependencies. Then you have unscrupulous types who might use load timings to detect cache state for user profiling... I'm sure there's a better solution for that than just disabling cross-site caching...

I digress.

> I foresee all of this CSS/HTML stuff as eventually being declared a sort of legacy format and adding a standard way to ship pluggable rendering engines/language runtimes.

I doubt this is going to happen as long as backwards compatibility continues to be W3C's north star. That's why all current browsers can still render the first website created by TBL in 1989.

Sure, official support for certain extensions should happen but HTML/CSS will always be at the core.

11 years ago we had Python 2.7.8 and 3.4.0 so no type hints, no async await, no match syntax, no formatted string literals, large number couldn’t be written like this 13_370_000_000, etc.

Developers deserve nice things.

> Developers deserve nice things.

I agree they do. But Python is a bad counterexample. You can upgrade your Python on your server and no one has to know about it. But if you want to use new CSS features, then every browser has to implement that feature and every user has to upgrade their browser.

The intent of my comment was to express a desire to stabilize the web API in particular, not to freeze all software development in its tracks.

But people ship python software, just like they ship CSS software, and python is bundled in many operating systems. When somebody ships e.g. a CLI tool to manipulate subtitle files, and it uses a language feature from python 3.9, that somebody is excluding you from running it on your 11 year old system.

People get new browser versions for free, there are more important things to thing about than users that for some reason don‘t want to upgrade. Like I would rather have my layout done quickly with nice elegant code (and no hacks) and spend my extra time developing an excellent UX for my users that rely on assistive technology.

Note that your wish for stabilization was delivered by the CSSWG with the @supports rule. Now developers can use new features without breaking things for users on older browser. So if a developer wants to use `display: grid-lanes` they can put it in an @supports clause. However if you are running firefox 45 (released in May 2016; used by 0.09% of the global users) @supports will not work and my site will not work on your browser. I—and most developers—usually don’t put things in an @support clause that passes "last 2 version, not dead, > 0.2%"

> Maybe things should stop changing.

There are two kinds of technologies: those that change to meet user needs, and those that have decided to start dying and being replaced by technologies that change to meet user needs.

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