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Comment by mattmanser | Hacker News Reader

For the sIFR thing don't blame the website designers, blame the browsers and HTML group.

And as for 'more appropriate standards-based techniques', the phrase gives me the creeps.

We're living in an age of a range of wonderful languages, fantastic form markup languages, superb IDEs.

Apart from in web applications.

Languages? Javascript. One choice. And a very odd one at that. Markup? HTML. Yuck, no extensibility, barely updated for 10 years, way, way, way behind flash or xaml, it hasn't even got close to what's available to us on desktops yet. Javascript IDEs? None of any note that I've come across.

Wouldn't it be great if Chrome, Safari or Firefox added in python or ruby client-side support. Or all of them, really kill off IE...

It's a dire state of affairs, Microsoft are to blame, but I wouldn't celebrate 'standards-based' techniques. They're frustratingly constricting and old fashioned.

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>Languages? Javascript. One choice. And a very odd one at that. Markup? HTML. Yuck, no extensibility, barely updated for 10 years, way, way, way behind flash or xaml, it hasn't even got close to what's available to us on desktops yet.

Choice is a wonderful thing, but take a look at how different the browsers are at implementing these basic, single languages. Imagine if you had to worry about cross browser support for another language. You might not just have to write your webpage to support IE6, but have to rewrite it in another language. It'd be great if we had multiple web languages, but it'd also be great if we had one single web language that actually worked 100% consistently cross platform.

For the most part, we do have a single web language that is reasonably consistent across platforms... if you keep things simple.

Where things get dicey is when designers demand a high level of control over the cosmetics (i.e., pixel perfection) or developers demand a high level of control over the interactivity (i.e., making rich internet apps, etc.).

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with pixel perfect design or rich internet applications, but it is the desire to make the browser a design/media/application platform that created all these cross-browser issues.

On a side note, sometimes I wonder if there would be more fat clients if Windows did not introduce DLL hell. DLL hell and app maintenance contributed to the enterprise market's desire for browser based applications.

If you take iOS for example, you see a lot of apps for site content that are native and richer than a browser, but still rely heavily on http. That model seems to be thriving.

I thought designers had free will. Some choose not to accept the limitations of browsers and use sIFR to get past those limitations.

How can they not bear any responsibility for an implementation choice?

One word: Cufon.

True, but it came long after sIFR.

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