Posts in the Standards Category

My referrers lit up recently due to Jonathan Snook’s article about CSS resets and how he doesn’t use them.  To Jonathan and all the doubters and nay-sayers out there, I have only one thing to say:

Good for you.

Seriously; no sarcasm or passive-aggressiveness intended.  If I thought my reset styles, or really anything I’ve ever published or advocated, was a be-all end-all ultimate solution for every designer and design that’s ever been and could ever be, I’d be long past due for six rounds on the receiving end of a clue-by-four.

Reset styles clearly work for a lot of people, whether as-is or in a modified form.  As I say on the reset page, those styles aren’t supposed to be left alone by anyone.  They’re a starting point.  If a thousand people took them and created a thousand different personalized style sheets, that would be right on the money.  But there’s also nothing wrong with taking them and writing your own overrides.  If that works for you, then awesome.

For others, reset styles are more of an impediment.  That’s only to be expected; we all work in different ways.  The key here, and the reason I made the approving comment above, is that you evaluate various tools by thinking about how they relate to the ways you do what you do—and then choose what tools to use, and how, and when.  That’s the mark of someone who thinks seriously about their craft and strives to do it better.

I’m not saying that craftsmen/craftswomen are those people who reject the use of common tools, of course.  I’m saying that they use the tools that fit them best and modify (or create) tools to best fit them, applying their skills and knowledge of their craft to make those decisions.  It’s much the same in the world of programming.  You can’t identify a code craftsman by whether or not they use this framework or that language.  You can identify them by how they decide which framework or language to use, or not use, in a given situation.

Craftsmanship is something I’ve been thinking about quite a bit recently, as has Joshua Porter.  I delivered a keynote address on that very topic just a few days ago in Minneapolis, and my thinking infuses both of the talks I’m giving next week at An Event Apart New Orleans.  I’ve started looking harder for evidence of it, both in myself and in what I see online, and I believe striving toward being a craftsman/craftswoman is an important process for anyone who chooses to work in this field.

Because this isn’t a field of straightforward answers and universal solutions.  We are often faced with problems that have multiple solutions, none of them perfect.  To understand what makes each solution imperfect and to know which of them is the best choice in the situation—that’s knowing your craft.  That’s being a craftsman/craftswoman.  It’s a never-ending process that is all the more critical precisely because it is never-ending.

So it’s no surprise that we, as a community, keep building and sharing solutions to problems we encounter.  Discussions about the merits of those solutions in various situations are also no surprise.  Indeed, they’re exactly the opposite: the surest and, to me, most hopeful sign that web design/development continues to mature as a profession, a discipline, and a craft.  It’s evidence that we continue to challenge ourselves and each other to advance our skills, to keep learning better and better how better to do what we love so much.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.

• Crafting Ourselves was published on Thursday, April 17th, 2008.
• It was assigned to the Commentary, CSS, Culture, Standards, and Web categories.
• There have been fifty replies.

• Full Disclosure was published on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008.
• It was assigned to the Humor and Standards categories.
• There have been four replies.

So the feeds I read have been buzzing the past few days with running commentary of the WebKit and Opera teams’ race to be the first to hit 100/100 on Acid3, and then after that the effort to get a pixel-perfect match with the reference image.  Last I saw, Opera claimed to have gotten to 100 first but it looked like WebKit had gotten both with something publicly available, but I haven’t verified any of this for myself.  Nor do I have any particular plans to do so.

Because as lovely as it is to see that you can, in fact, get one or more browser implementation teams to jump in a precisely defined sequence through a series of cunningly (one might say sadistically) placed hoops, half of which are on fire and the other half lined with razor wire, it doesn’t strike me as the best possible use of the teams’ time and energy.

No, I don’t hate standards, though I may hate freedom (depends on who’s asking).  What I disagree with is the idea that if you cherry-pick enough obscure and difficult corners of a bunch of different specifications and mix them all together into a spicy meatball of difficulty, it constitutes a useful test of the specifications you cherry-picked.  Because the one does not automatically follow from the other.

For example, suppose I told you that WebKit had implemented just the bits of SMIL-related SVG needed to pass the test, and that in doing so they exposed a woefully incomplete SVG implementation, one that gets something like 2% pass rates on actual SMIL/SVG tests.  Laughable, right?  Yes, well.

Of course, that’s in a nightly build and they might totally support SMIL by the time the corresponding final version is released and we’ll all look back on this and laugh the carefree laugh of children in springtime.  Maybe.  The real point here is that the Acid3 test isn’t a broad-spectrum standards-support test.  It’s a showpiece, and something of a Potemkin village at that.  Which is a shame, because what’s really needed right now is exhaustive test suites for specifications– XHTML, CSS, DOM, SVG, you name it.  We’ve been seeing more of these emerge recently, but they’re not enough.  I’d have been much more firmly in the cheering section had the effort that went into Acid3 had gone into, say, an obssessively thorough DOM test suite.

I’d had this post in mind for a while now, really ever since Acid3 was released.  Then the horse race started to develop, and I told myself I really needed to get around to writing that post—and I got overtaken.  Well, that’s being busy for you.  It’s just as well I waited, really, because much of what I was going to say got covered by Mike Shaver in his piece explaining why Firefox 3 isn’t going to hit 100% on Acid3.  For example:

Ian’s Acid3, unlike its predecessors, is not about establishing a baseline of useful web capabilities. It’s quite explicitly about making browser developers jump… the Acid tests shouldn’t be fair to browsers, they should be fair to the web; they should be based on how good the web will be as a platform if all browsers conform, not about how far any given browser has to stretch to get there.

That’s no doubt more concisely and clearly stated than I would have managed, so it’s all for the best that he got to say it first.

By the by, I was quite intrigued by this part of Mike’s post:

You might ask why Mozilla’s not racking up daily gains, especially if you’re following the relevant bugs and seeing that people have produced patches for some issues that are covered by Acid3.

The most obvious reason is Firefox 3. We’re in the end-game of building what I really do believe is the best browser the web has ever known, and we expect to be putting it in the hands of more than 170 million users in a pretty short period of time. We’re still taking fixes for important issues, but virtually none of the issues on the Acid3 list are important enough for us to take at this stage. We don’t want to be rushing fixes in, or rushing out a release, only to find that we’ve broken important sites or regressed previous standards support, or worse introduced a security problem. Every API that’s exposed to content needs to be tested for compliance and security and reliability… We think these remaining late-stage patches are worth the test burden, often because they help make the web platform much more powerful, and reflect real-web compatibility and capability issues. Acid3’s contents, sadly, are not as often of that nature.

You know, it’s weird, but that seems really familiar, like I’ve heard or read something like that before.  Now if only I could remember…  Oh yeah!  It’s basically what the IE team said about not passing Acid2 when the IE7 betas came out, for which they were promptly excoriated.

Huh.

Well, never mind that now.  Of course it was a totally different set of circumstances and core motivations, and I’m sure there’s absolutely no parallel to be drawn between the two situations.  At all.

Returning to the main point here:  I’m a little bit sad, to tell the truth.  The original acid test was a prefect example of what I think makes for a good stress test.  Recall that the test’s original name, before it got shorthanded, was the “Box Model Acid Test”.  It was a test of CSS box model handling, including floats.  That’s all it was designed to do.  It did that fairly well for its time, considering it was part of a CSS1 test suite.  It didn’t try to combine box model testing with tests for PNG support, HTML parse error recovery, and DOM scripting.

To me, the ideal CSS test suite is one that has a bunch of basic property/value tests, like the ones I’ve been responsible for creating (1, 2), along with a bunch of acid tests for specific areas or concepts in that specification.  So an acidified CSS test suite would have individual acid tests for the box model, positioning, fonts, selectors, table layout, and so on.  It would not involve scripting or markup parsing (beyond what’s needed to handle selectors).  It would not use animated SVG icons.  Hell, it probably wouldn’t even use PNGs, except possibly alphaed PNGs when testing opacity and RGBA colors.  And maybe not even then.

So in a DOM test suite, you’d have one test page for each method or attribute, and then build some acid tests out of related bits (say, on an entire interface or set of closely related interfaces).  And maybe, at the end, you’d build an overarching acid test that rolled verything in the DOM spec into one fiendishly difficult test.  But it would be just about the DOM and whatever absolute minimum of other stuff you needed, like text rendering and maybe GIF support.  (Similarly, the CSS tests had to assume some basic HTML and CSS selector support, or else everything else fell down.)

And then, after all those test suites have been built up and a series of acid tests woven into them, with each one culminating in its own spec-spanning acid test, you might think about taking those end-point acid tests and slamming them all together into one super-ultra-hyper-mega acid test, something that even the xenomorphs from the Alien series would look at and say, “That’s gonna sting”.  That would be awesome.  But that’s not what we have.

I fully acknowledge that a whole lot of very clever thinking went into the construction of Acid3 (as was true of Acid2), and that a lot of very smart people have worked very hard to pass it.  Congratulations all around, really.  I just can’t help feeling like some broader and more important point has been missed.  To me, it’s kind of like meeting the general challenge of finding an economical way to loft broadband transceivers to an altitude of 25,000 feet (in order to get full coverage of large metropolitan areas while avoiding the jetstream) by daring a bunch of teams to plant a transceiver near the summit of Mount Everest—and then getting them to do it.  Progress toward the summit can be demonstrated and kudos bestowed afterward, but there’s a wider picture that seems to have been overlooked in the process.

• Acid Redux was published on Thursday, March 27th, 2008.
• It was assigned to the Browsers and Standards categories.
• There have been thirty-five replies.

I woke up this morning (duh DAAAH dah DUH) and yesterday’s announcement was the first thing on my mind.  No doubt it’ll be a recurrent topic, at least for a little while.

One of the takeaways is what this change demonstrates about the IE team:  standards is and was their preferred default.  If it weren’t, they just would have found a way to square the IE7-default behavior with the Interoperability Principles announced late last month (slightly tricky but entirely possible).  That they initially chose otherwise speaks volumes about the pressures they face internally, and their willingness to publicly change direction speaks volumes about their commitment to supporting standards.  While I’m sure community feedback informed their decision, they pretty much knew what the reaction would be from the get-go.  If that was going to be the deciding factor, they would’ve chosen differently up front.

So what drove that change?  I keep coming back to two things, both of which were explicitly mentioned in yesterday’s announcement.

The first is, perhaps obviously, the previously mentioned Interoperability Principles.  Head on over there and read Principle II, “Support for Standards”.  If that isn’t a solid foundation on which to build an internal case for change, I don’t know what is.  I’m wryly amused by the idea that the IE team used the Interoperability Principles as a way to batter their way out of the grip of those internal pressures I mentioned.  The former aikido student in me finds that very satisfying.  True, the Principles came under fire for being just another set of empty words, but it would seem that they can be used for at least some concrete good.

As for the second, there’s a phrase repeated between the two announcements that I didn’t quote yesterday because I was still pondering its meaning.  I’m still not certain about it, but having had a chance to sleep on it, my initial reading hasn’t changed, so I’m going to quote and comment on it now.  First, from the press release:

“While we do not believe there are currently any legal requirements that would dictate which rendering mode must be chosen as the default for a given browser, this step clearly removes this question as a potential legal and regulatory issue,” said Brad Smith, Microsoft senior vice president and general counsel.

And then in Dean’s IEblog post:

While we do not believe any current legal requirements would dictate which rendering mode a browser must use, this step clearly removes this question as a potential legal and regulatory issue.

Okay, so they’re on message.  And the message seems to be this: that Opera’s move to link IE development to the larger EU anti-trust investigation bore fruit.  I was highly critical of that move, and unless I’m seriously misreading what I see here, I was wrong.  I’m still no fan of the tone that was used in announcing the move, but that’s window dressing.  Results matter most.

Speaking of Opera, there’s another side to all this that I find quite interesting.  So far, the reaction to Microsoft’s announcement has been overwhelmingly positive.  The sense I’ve picked up is, “Hooray! IE will act like browsers always have, and the problem is solved!”.

But is it?  The primary objection raised by Opera and several members of the community was that version targeting is an anti-competitive move, one which will force browser makers like Opera and authors of JavaScript libraries to support an ever-increasing and complex web (sorry) of rendering-engine behaviors in the market leader.  So far as I can tell, the change in default behavior does next to nothing to address that objection.  The various versions will still be there and still invoke-able by any page author who so chooses.  Yes, the default will be better for authors, but I don’t see how things get any better for Opera, Firefox, Safari, jQuery, Prototype, et. al.

Perhaps I’ve missed something basic (“Again!” shouts the chorus).  If so, what?  If not, then why all the hosannas?

• Principles and Legality was published on Tuesday, March 4th, 2008.
• It was assigned to the Browsers and Standards categories.
• There have been thirty-one replies.

Now here’s something I didn’t expect to see when I woke up this morning:

“Microsoft Expands Support for Web Standards: Company outlines new approach to make standards-based rendering the default mode in Internet Explorer 8, will work with Web designers and content developers to help with standards behavior transition.”

Seriously, that’s the title and subhead of Microsoft’s latest press release.

About halfway through, there’s this from Ray Ozzie:

…we have decided to give top priority to support for these new Web standards. In keeping with the commitment we made in our Interoperability Principles of being even more transparent in how we support standards in our products, we will work with content publishers to ensure they fully understand the steps we are taking and will encourage them to use this beta period to update their sites to transition to the more current Web standards supported by IE8.

See also the IEblog entry Microsoft’s Interoperability Principles and IE8, where Dean Hachamovitch says:

Microsoft recently published a set of Interoperability Principles. Thinking about IE8’s behavior with these principles in mind, interpreting web content in the most standards compliant way possible is a better thing to do.

We think that acting in accordance with principles is important, and IE8’s default is a demonstration of the interoperability principles in action.

In other words, the IE team seems to have used recent Microsoft PR efforts to their, and our, advantage.

I’m relieved and glad on the one hand, and a little worried on the other.  It’s not like the issues I discussed, or Jeffrey wrote about, have gone away.  It’s just that the way in which they’re handled by IE has shifted—which in some ways is a huge difference.

I think what worries me most is the possibility that when the public beta hits, there will be enough incompatibility problems that pushback from other constiuencies forces a change back to the original behavior.  I hope not.  I hope that what will happen is that any problems that come up will be addressed by spreading the news far and wide that there’s a simple one-line fix for those sites.

I’m glad that IE will act as browsers have always done, and default to the latest and greatest in the absence of any explicit direction to the contrary.  I’m doubly glad that the IE team is willing to do that, even knowing what they have to handle.  And I’m triply glad that the proposal was made in public ahead of time, with plenty of opportunity for debate, so that we could have a chance to weigh in and affect the browser’s behavior.

• Meta-change was published on Monday, March 3rd, 2008.
• It was assigned to the Browsers and Standards categories.
• There have been forty-seven replies.

A List Apart #253 brings the issue of version targeting back into the limelight with opposing-view pieces by Jeremy Keith and Jeffrey Zeldman.  (And I love the “Editor’s Choice” on this issue, J. David Eisenberg’s “‘Forgiving’ Browsers Considered Harmful“.)

I’m not going to comment on the views presented; both gentlemen do a fine job.  What I do wish to add, or perhaps to restate, is an observation about everyone interested in, and thinking or arguing about, this topic:

We all care about the same thing.

We all want to advance web standards.  We all want browsers to improve their support.  We all want better and more advanced specifications.  We all want to reduce inconsistencies.  We all want a better web.

The disagreement is over how best to get there given the situation we face now, as well as how we perceive that current situation.  A recurrent metaphor for me is that we’re a large group of pioneers trying to chart the best course through an unknown country, and there is disagreement on which route entails the least risk to the whole group.  Cross the desert or the mountains?  Traverse a swampy delta or a hilly forest?  Move through this valley or that one?

Sometimes what binds us is strong enough that the few differences seem sharper by comparison.  That shouldn’t keep us from remembering what we have in common, and the importance of that commonality.

• Common Bonds was published on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008.
• It was assigned to the Browsers and Standards categories.
• There have been eighteen replies.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Cleveland Web Standards Association.  Specifically, its brand-new web site, courtesy a small band of association members who worked together to design and develop it.  It’s a lovely little semantic number, chock full of microformats and member content aggregators.

In case you hadn’t heard about the CWSA yet and are wondering what the group is like, allow me to quote the About page:

The CWSA is an organization grounded on the premise of sharing information in a relaxed atmosphere. We hold monthly gatherings that include presentations on best practices in web development. The gatherings are open to any person interested in web design/development, no matter what their current skill level is.

This isn’t just a social club, though.  We’re not just sharing our skills with each other, but are also working to use those skills in the service of helping others.  I don’t want to steal any thunder, so if you want to find out the details, you’ll just have to come find out for yourself.

We’ll be having our next meeting in a week, 5 February 2008, in our usual space at Tri-C (and many thanks to the college for giving us a home!).  This is definitely a meeting to make, because the topic will be the current and future direction of the association, including deciding the topics on which we want to have presentations and figuring out how best to use the raw talent and enthusiasm of the group for maximal good.  If you’re in the area, you should absolutely come check things out.  If you know someone in the area, kindly pass the word on to them.

• Cleveland Web Standards Association was published on Tuesday, January 29th, 2008.
• It was assigned to the Cleveland and Standards categories.
• There have been eighteen replies.

I’d like to tell you a little story, if I may, from way, way back in 2002.  (The exact date is lost to the mists of time, but the year is pretty solid.)  Like a lot of stories, it’s little bit long; but unlike some stories, it’s true.

As the engineering staff at Netscape prepared a new release of Mozilla, the browser off which we branched Navigator, those of us in the Technology Evangelism/Developer Support (TEDS) team were testing it against high-ranked and partner sites.  On a few of those sites, we discovered that layouts were breaking apart.  In one case, it did so quite severely.

It didn’t take much to see that the problem was with sliced images in layout tables.  For some reason, on some sites they were getting pushed apart.  After a bit of digging, we realized the reason: the Gecko engine had updated its line-layout model to be more compliant with the CSS specification.  Now images always sat on the baseline (unless otherwise directed) and the descender space was always preserved.

This was pretty new in browserdom, because every other browser did what browsers had always done: shrink-wrapped table cells to an image if there was no other cell content.  The only problem was that behavior was wrong.  Fixing the flaws in the CSS implementation in Gecko had broken these sites’ layouts.  That is, it broke them in standards mode.  In quirks mode, Gecko rolled its behavior back to the old days and did the shrink-wrap thing.

We got in touch with the web team at one of the affected sites, a very prominent social networking site (of a sort) of the day, and explained the situation.  We already knew they couldn’t change their DOCTYPE to trigger quirks mode, because that would break other things they were doing.  We couldn’t offer them a simple CSS fix like td img {vertical-align: bottom;}, because their whole layout was in tables and that would throw off the placement of all their images, not just the sliced ones.  All we could offer was an explanation of the problem and to recommend they class all of their sliced images and use CSS to bottom them out, with assurances that this would cause no change in other browsers.

Their response was, in effect:  “No.  This is your problem.  Every other browser gets this right, and we’re not mucking around in our templates and adding classes all over just because you broke something.”

The truth, of course, was that we were actually fixing something, and every other browser got this wrong.  The truth was not relevant to our problem.  It seemed we had a choice: we could back out the improvement to our handling of the CSS specification; or we could break the site and all the other sites like it, which at the time were many.  Neither was really palatable.  And word was we could not ship without fixing this problem, whether by getting the site updated or the browser changed.  Those were the options.

Let me reiterate the situation we faced.  We:

1. Had improved standards support in the browser, and then
2. Found sites whose layouts broke as a result
3. Whose developers point-blank refused to alter their sites
4. And we had to fix the problem

We couldn’t back out the improvement; it affected all text displayed in the browser and touched too many other things.  We couldn’t make the site’s web team change anything, no matter how many times we told them this was part of the advance of web standards and better browser behavior.  Two roads diverged in a yellow web, and we could choose neither.

So we found a third way: “almost standards” mode, a companion to the usual modes of quirks and standards.  Yes, this is the reason why “almost standards” mode exists.  If I remember the internal argument properly, its existence is largely my fault; so to everyone who’s had to implement an “almost standards” mode in a non-Gecko browser in order to mirror what we did, I’m sorry.

We made “almost standards” mode apply to the DOCTYPE found on the offending site—an XHTML DOCTYPE, I should point out.  While we were at it, we rolled in IBM’s custom DTD.  They were using it make their site validate while doing all kinds of HTML-invalid stuff, and they were experiencing the same layout problem.  And lo: a third layout mode was born.  All because some sites were badly done and would not update to accommodate our improvements.  We did it so as not to break a small (but popular) portion of the web while we advanced our standards support.

(By the way, it was this very same incident that gave birth to the article “Images, Tables, and Mysterious Gaps“.)

Now take that situation and multiply it by a few orders of magnitude, and you get an idea of what the IE team faces.  It’s right where we were at Netscape: caught between our past mistakes and a site’s refusal to accommodate our desire to improve support for open standards.

Some have said that Microsoft is in a unique position to take leadership and spread the news of improved standards and updating old sites to its customers.  That’s true.  But what happens when a multi-billion dollar partner corporation refuses to update and demands, under the terms of its very large service contract and its very steep penalty clauses, that a new version of IE not break (for whatever value of “break” you like) its corporate intranet, or its public e-commerce site?  It only takes one to create a pretty large roadblock.

For all we did in publishing great content to DevEdge, proactively helping sites to update their markup and CSS and JS to work with Gecko (while not breaking in other browsers), and helping guide the improvement of standards support in Gecko, we could not overcome this obstacle.  We had to work around it.

Looking back on it now, it’s likely this experience subconsciously predisposed me to eventually accept the version targeting proposal, because in a fairly substantial way, it’s what we did to Mozilla under similar conditions.  We just did it in a much more obscure and ultimately fragile manner, tying it to certain DOCTYPEs instead of some more reliable anchor.  If we could have given that site (all those sites) an easy way to say “render like Mozilla 0.9” (or whatever) at the top of every page, or in the server headers, they might have taken it.

But had we offered and they refused, putting us back to the choice of backing out the improvements or changing the browser, would we have set things up to default to the specific, known version of Mozilla instead of the latest and greatest?  The idealist in me likes to think not.  The pragmatist in me nods yes.  What else could we have done in that circumstance?  Shipped a browser that broke a top-ten site on the theory that once it was in the wild, they’d acquiesce?  Even knowing that this would noticeably and, in a few cases, seriously degrade the browsing experience for our users?  No.  We’d have shipped without the CSS improvement, or we’d have put in the targeting with the wrong default.  We didn’t have version targeting, but we still made the same choice, only we hinged it on the DOCTYPE.

A short-term fix for a short-term problem: yes.  Yet had we not done it, how long would Netscape/Mozilla’s standards support have suffered, waiting for the day that we could add that improvement back in without breaking too many sites that too many people would notice?  Years, possibly.  So we put in a badly implemented type of version targeting, which allowed us to improve our standards support more quickly than we otherwise would have, and it has been with us for the more than half a decade since.

So maybe I’m more sympathetic to the IE predicament and their proposed solution because I’ve been there and done it already.  Not to nearly the same degree, but the dilemma seemed no less daunting for all the difference in scale.  It’s something worth keeping in mind while evaluating what I’ve said on this topic, and whatever I will say in the future.

• Almost Target was published on Thursday, January 24th, 2008.
• It was assigned to the Browsers, History, and Standards categories.
• There have been eighty-two replies.