Re: Proposal: standardize browser specific CSS include

On Tuesday 2007-10-16 15:35 +0200, niels@internetarchitects.be wrote:
> 2. What is the feature you are suggesting to help solve it?
> 
> Microsoft came up with the idea of conditional comments. This allowed people to
> write (and include) a specific CSS file for each browser (or even browser version).
> 
> The idea of including a separate CSS file for browsers that need CSS fixes for a
> certain project is extremely strong. Rather than standardizing conditional
> comments, a feature where a CSS file could be included for a specific browser
> (version) would be ideal.

I'm against this because it would either:

  1. as I described in [1], lead to increased use of
browser-specific and version-specific CSS, which would make it
harder for new browsers to enter the market and thus reduce
innovation on and development of the Web, or

  2. lead to all browsers entering the market to pretend to be the
market-leading browser, making the feature useless.  For example,
look what happened to the HTTP User-Agent header:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; ja-jp) AppleWebKit/419.2.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/419.3
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; FDM)

Or maybe both (depending on how exactly it handles version
checking).

-David

[1] http://www.w3.org/mid/20070406002721.GA16677@ridley.dbaron.org

-- 
L. David Baron                                 http://dbaron.org/
Mozilla Corporation                       http://www.mozilla.com/

Received on Thursday, 1 November 2007 22:48:25 UTC