“Until the web gets basic native UI elements like pickers, sliders, tooltips and so forth, anybody supporting open standards is fooling themselves that they on the right bandwagon. ” – pickers, sliders are in the HTML 5 spec as native UI elements. Tooltips can be accomplished via JavaScript or absolutely positioning elements.

The original guidelines required government websites to test only on popualr browsers. The most popular browser is IE. By
“whining to governments”, the community has changed those guidelines so *all* standards-compliant browsers must be tested and the sites must work with them.

therefore, the community has helped break Microsoft’s stranglehold here. That’s a victory for choice, and one of the many ways of pressurising Microsoft.

Another is the EU investigation of Microsoft’s business practices regarding IE, which recently led to the EU sending MS a Statement of Objections yesterday, accusing it of illegally tying Internet Explorer to the Windows PC operating system. (Disclosure: my employers asked the EU to investigate, press release: http://www.opera.com/press/releases/2009/01/17/)

You say “Progressive enhancement puts all the burden or shit browsers on developers.”. You’re right. It does. It’s frustrating, hence I share your frustration.

But it’s what we do as professionals.

Microsoft want to make money out of Silverlight like Adobe do out of Flash.

Unless forced to do so, Microsoft will not provide any support in IE9 for browser standards that advance the web to a point where it competes with Silverlight. Hence Microsoft will never include canvas and SVG support because scripting vector art is the one core differentiation b/w open standards web design and the proprietary Flash/Silverlight approach.

Until the web gets basic native UI elements like pickers, sliders, tooltips and so forth, anybody supporting open standards is fooling themselves that they on the right bandwagon. I’ve been one of these people but I’ve had enough. I will not tolerate one more crappy JS-based picker/slider. I will not blend proprietary code (Flash) with complicated JS to get a mulitple file upload widget. I will not over-write standards code with ondomload JS and delude myself that the code I am writing is standards compliant because parsers only verify source code pre-domloaded.

So long as the UK gov is not favouring any one browser but rather providing a reasonable level of support for good multiplatform proprietary *and* open source browser options, SO BE IT!

A browser support list of Firefox, IE and Safari covers all scenarios. Crapintosh is supported with choice, same for Windows. Linux users can choose Firefox and wait for Chrome.

Big deal!

Stop whining to governments and force the glacial W3C to either get it’s act together or become irrelevant when governments like the EU make determinations that actually achieve something!

Still, as bad as things like the underscore hack are, I prefer them as they can sit alongside the “valid” rules rather than in seperate stylesheets inserted via conditional comments or similar.

Obviously every CSS ‘hack’ should be preceded by a comment explaining which browser is being targeted and why. Perhaps that should be the rule in the standard.

Vendor prefixes are allowed, so it’s valid to use -x-whatever, see http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/syndata.html#vendor-keywords

The only part I’m not keen on is the “must” for valid CSS. The CSS spec is designed to handle invalid syntax and unrecognised properties and values (http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/syndata.html#parsing-errors).

If the CSS must be valid, you’d be unable to use “-moz-inline-box”, “zoom:1″, “filter:alpha(opacity=50)” etc etc.

Also, the guidelines do not state which version of CSS to validate against. As browsers adopt new rules, you’d be unable to use them unless they’re part of the spec you are validating against. As support improves, you may want to do something like:

background-color: rgb(127, 127, 127);
background-color: -ie-rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5);
background-color: -whatever-rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5);
background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5);

But this standard would prevent it.

Personally, I’d do away with the need for valid CSS and replace it with a rule advising against CSS hacks.

The beauty of CSS is you can use invalid properties as safely as a valid property, as you know exactly how a compliant browser will handle it.

Jake.

If only they listened to expert opinion on other matters!