Re: Proposal: standardize browser specific CSS include

L. David Baron wrote:
> 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).
>   
I had an impression that good versioning system helps evolution but not 
prevents it.
Like in C/C++ world it allows to make compilers better e.g. to fix old bugs.

Each C/C++ compiler has its own vendor/version identifier. No one known 
compiler is pretending to be another one.
Conditional compilation feature allows library/application vendors to 
support set of compilers (read: UAs) and not only one.

I suspect that FireFox can be compiled by different compilers. And these 
compilers may differ pretty significantly.
I think that without conditional compilation feature that is built-in in 
C/C++ such projects as Gecko were even possible.

I think that Web will benefit from conditional CSS includes. It will 
make possible new features to be implemented safely.

@has "module-new-css-features"
{
}

@has not "module-new-css-features"
{
}

Andrew Fedoniouk.
http://terrainformatica.com

Received on Friday, 2 November 2007 00:15:30 UTC