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Comment by anoneng | Hacker News Reader

This goes to show you’ve never been anywhere near the actual development cycle of a real-world front-end web application. “So, there is a baseline "target subset of HTML/CSS" that gives you 100% coverage.” Oh really? Which subset? Which “HTML/CSS?” And 100%? Absolutely laughable.

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Do you know any browsers which don’t support https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ (if you remove the google traffic tracking js that’s iirc tacked on at the end of the page (or maybe I’m thinking of better mfing website (which adds a tiny bit of css)? Idr.)) ?

I get that asking a commercial website to be as basic/supported as that website is a big ask. I don’t think the other commenter was saying that such websites should reach 100%, only that they should start from there and sacrifice only as much as is necessary.

> I get that asking a commercial website to be as basic/supported as that website is a big ask.

The trick isn't to get a commercial website to accept a site that basic, it's to get the website to test for capabilities and if it can't confirm them serve only the basic version. Websites should be every bit as fancy and obnoxious as they want as long as they fail gracefully.

But this isn’t about websites or just publishing articles or the weather. It’s about web applications, commerce, products, things with customers not just readers. As soon as you have an application that’s doing anything nontrivial then you have to draw a line and say “nope we’re not supporting that at all” and there’s sections along the line where you can’t even fail gracefully.

In the real world that means there is a list of browsers and versions tested on.

Completely bad faith reply when your example uses zero CSS, no HTML links even, and the only script to distinguish it from a bare static text document is google analytics malware. This isn’t falling back, it is the fallback. Expecting most modern web application to function at that level is for most purposes, simply stupid. Like putting hitching posts in a high rise apartment’s sub-basement parking levels.

Only a couple percent of websites have a significant need to be "modern web applications".

Yes that is the fallback. That doesn't make it a bad example. Your core functionality should work on almost everything even if it's laid out a bit weird and missing niceties.

So: not bad faith and your accusation is unreasonable

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