24th September 2010, 7:54 PM
(This post was last modified: 24th September 2010, 8:08 PM by Dark Jaguar.)
Sorry if my wall o' text-fu scared away a read attempt, but actually I did bring that up.
Firefox and Chrome apparently support more of the HTML standards right now, and they DID do that first. The IE team has made a point of supporting only the "completed" or "last call phase" HTML5 standards, so that they don't need to back-track or change features down the line. This may seem lazy, but their reasoning, while annoying, is pretty sound. It comes down to the fact that, well, IE is the "lowest common denominator" of web design. Every web developer has to make sure, at the very least, their site runs on IE. The pathetic part is making sure it runs on IE6 (though more and more sites are abandoning support for it, such as Google). With that in mind, the IE team doesn't want to give developers a "moving target" of unpredictable feature support. By only adding web standards that are complete or very unlikely to change before being declared complete, developers can just go ahead and start designing their sites based on standards and completely ignore which browser is being used. Just pick the completed standards and it should be set in stone with no need to update it later when IE has to change some "beta" standard to fit some recent overhaul.
Honestly when it's put like that, it makes sense, though mainly for IE. Other browsers have more freedom to experiment with the unfinalized standards.
Firefox and Chrome apparently support more of the HTML standards right now, and they DID do that first. The IE team has made a point of supporting only the "completed" or "last call phase" HTML5 standards, so that they don't need to back-track or change features down the line. This may seem lazy, but their reasoning, while annoying, is pretty sound. It comes down to the fact that, well, IE is the "lowest common denominator" of web design. Every web developer has to make sure, at the very least, their site runs on IE. The pathetic part is making sure it runs on IE6 (though more and more sites are abandoning support for it, such as Google). With that in mind, the IE team doesn't want to give developers a "moving target" of unpredictable feature support. By only adding web standards that are complete or very unlikely to change before being declared complete, developers can just go ahead and start designing their sites based on standards and completely ignore which browser is being used. Just pick the completed standards and it should be set in stone with no need to update it later when IE has to change some "beta" standard to fit some recent overhaul.
Honestly when it's put like that, it makes sense, though mainly for IE. Other browsers have more freedom to experiment with the unfinalized standards.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)