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Comment by fixermark | Hacker News Reader

This point of view is as ignorant of reality as the grammarians that say Webster's English is the only true English. Every standard is a three-edged sword: the spec, the intent behind the spec, and the practical application of the spec in the real world (which all-too-often, unfortunately, includes things like "Yeah, that's what the spec says, but then scammers realized you could exploit that to use people's browsers to mine Bitcoin or something, so no browser actually does that").

A web developer codes against real machines, not the imagined, idealized, and non-existent machines the specs describe.

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By your argument we should only need a single dictionary, Websters, because your language is real and not the imagined one people in other english places speak, Webster just happens to be the one that aligns closest to your usage of english.

If that were true then web developers would have never bothered supporting alternative browsers.

Regardless of browser matrices, it is the will of the developer to support the open web platform that made sure that Internet Explorer and thus Microsoft didn't own the web (browser) in the 2000s.

Anecdotally this point of view has done no harm to me and I'm not the only that shares it.

Web devs support multiple browsers for the same reason desktop and mobile software developers code against multiple operating systems: some of their customers prefer those systems, and when you ask a customer to switch their framework to support your product you risk they'll say "no."

The reason web developers care about those customers varies from dev to dev. Some believe there is value in a heterogeneous ecosystem of browser implementations. Some have a few high-value customers who refuse to switch (or, in the case of e.g. Microsoft, cannot switch because enterprise constraints are restricting what browser stack they're allowed to run).

But the point stands that when you support multiple browsers, you don't approach ideal user experience (in terms of performance and reliability) for all your customers by throwing your fingers in your ears and proclaiming "That browser is out of spec!" when you find a quirk---you do what you have to do to make your code run on, around, or in spite of the quirk.

The standards are the starting point for the code, that dosen't mean that a dev shouldn't then write code to support the quirks of the browsers.

Writing to support one browser first was exactly what got everyone down in the deep hole writing code for IE only to find that it didn't work the same in Firefox and Chrome early on.

Also the Dev should be well aware that anything they write to support quirks could well be invalid code such as IE conditional comments.

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