Flutterby™! : WaSP again 2004-09-04 16:52:25.962881+00

WaSP again

2004-09-04 16:52:25.962881+00 by Dan Lyke 5 comments

David Chess had a link to: WaSP: Browse Happy. This is the closest I've seen the The Web Standards Project come to admitting that some of their earlier misguided campaigns created the current virus-laden monoculture from which we struggle to escape.

Now if we can just get Apple and KDE to fix all of the grossness in the KHTML rendering engine. Getting the units wrong is one thing, semi-randomly forgetting that <div elements are block elements is not.

As a long-time supporter of WaSP and a member of the steering committee, I'm not quite sure how you're getting from here to there. Yeah, we encouraged people to get off Netscape 4, and I still think that that was a good thing. That didn't mean that everyone had to go and use IE/Win; there's no shortage of other browsers out there.

And I saw no other possible outcome for the "browser upgrade" (and I'm no longer linking to those pages, because they've apparently decided to willy-nilly 404 links, so there's no guarantee that I'm actually building any value by doing so) push than to create a monoculture of users using IE.

Which I think it did fairly effectively. And the obvious result of creating a monoculture occurred.

The big problem, and the source of my 6 year old disagreement with WaSP, is that we should have done everything we possibly could to keep users, and especially designers, from expecting that there could be pixel perfect layout information attached to the markup. Because, let's face it, we're still not there, if we ever get there then computer technology with have gone beyond stagnation, and the better thing to do is to push for better ways to describe the semantic content of the document and to ask browser makers to help users better visualize that content.

If you guys wanted to push for things like a consistent definition of "em", or ways to push the notion of image display at a text relative size, then I'd be right behind you. Instead we see further reinforcements of all of the stuff that requires device dependence, and decisions which mainly seem made to assuage the egos of bad designers. It's a basic philosophical difference, and I think it's one that I'll always have with the WaSP.

Nothing personal, I just think that some organizations, no matter the quality of some of the people involved in them, are terminally doomed to do stupid things, and that appears to be one of 'em.

So, y'know, I always heard lots of people grumping about Konq's lousy rendering, and I couldn't figure out what they were bitching about, because *I* used it all the time, and I never had much trouble with it.

And then I just redesigned my own weblog, courtesy of Haran and the Open Source Web Design folks... and it won't render it. <sigh>

#Comment But, of course made: 2004-09-10 02:25:59.714258+00 by: baylink

Neither will IE; at least not properly; the left margin drifts to the left a pixel or two per story.

Yeah, but IE

is a freakin' lost cause. It's so far out of whack that the only way to design for it is to take advantage of bugs in its CSS

parser.