12 posts filed under Cross-Browser Compatibility, newest first.
A client asked for the newsletter to match the new site, which is a completely reasonable request, and the answer involves explaining that the largest corporate email client in the world renders HTML using a word processor.
Support ends today, after nine years for this version and about 27 for the browser, and the thing I keep turning over is that it doesn't feel like anything, and that the not-feeling-like-anything is the whole story.
A client asked whether we could drop Internet Explorer and I said yes, cheerfully, in a meeting, and the next twenty minutes were among the worst I've had this year.
Firefox on the Tuesday, Chrome on the Thursday, and after seven years of building page layout out of a property that was invented to wrap text around a photograph, we have a layout system that was designed as one.
Nobody signs off a list of browsers in week one. So it gets decided in a corridor in week six, by whoever is standing there, and by then it's a concession rather than a decision.
Five pages, a contact form, updated roughly twice a year, and I spent an evening giving it an offline experience. I've been trying since to work out honestly whether that was worth doing or just fun.
Most of what jQuery was invented to fix has been fixed in the browsers, and a lot of us are still loading the whole library to avoid typing a slightly longer method name.
Every browser has picked a different answer to what should happen while a web font downloads, and all of the answers are bad so the decision quietly falls to you whether you choose to make it or not.
Flexbox has crossed the line where I can use it on real work, and the surprise isn't the layouts it enables. It's how much of my CSS turns out to have been compensation for not having it.
Browser support looks like a technical decision and gets argued as one, but it's a commercial decision with a number attached, and the number is usually available if you go and ask for it.
We are building every grid on the web out of a property invented to wrap text around a picture, and the pile of workarounds we've grown on top of it has stopped looking like workarounds.
Div soup is what you write before you learn what the other hundred elements are for. The argument for fixing it isn't screenreaders or SEO, it's the next person who opens the file.