WebKit Isn't Breaking the Web. You Are | Webmonkey | Wired.com:

We at Webmonkey hope it’s obvious that building WebKit-only sites is a waste of time. If you’re only interested in iOS users then take a tip from Instagram and build a native app.


Let's just quickly say that's crazy advice, and it misses the point of Glazman's critique.

If you don't know Objective-C, by all means, leverage what you do know if it'll make a strong HTML5 app for mobile devices. Use PhoneGap. Enjoy. No guilt required. Seriously, if you can't code HTML5 for other browsers you need to learn to code Obj-C in Xcode? Insane and inane.

The point is that those who use HTML5 shouldn't use browser-specific prefixes. Not sure how I feel about that either. If one browser (or rendering engine) is so far in front of another, then it's going to "win" the adoption war. Examples are written with webkit prefixes, they're copy and pasted, seem to work okay for their intended browser, and we're done. It's a non-trivial expense to learn that webkit isn't a standard if you're a gunslinger. (I'm not arguing we should be gunslingers, but that browsers should realize they exist. LOTS of them.)

If the other browsers support those CSS standards with their own prefixes (and with standardized ones), it's a heck of a lot easier to have the browsers support the different models than every programmer. Any time you're asking a programmer to write something twice to do things right (really, I'm pretty tired of if (document.getElementById) { branch1 } else...), you're doing it wrong. Get the cheese off of your face. Normalize. Put the logic where it belongs.

To be clear: In this case, it means Firefox needs to get over itself and chase WebKit. IE might follow. Do we care?

It's an ivory tower versus the market issue. You can't control programmers absolutely. I, in theory, like where Glazman is going. And in practice, just mentioning it will lessen the issue. Let's just stop pretending it's a zero-effort change for programmers to write platform neutral code and, therefore, as long as browsers are less than 100% equal, you'll always have a percentage of the code in the wild that supports one over the other.

Degrade? Sure. Write to treat each version of each browser equally? Impossible. [sic]

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