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Comment by yuchi | Hacker News Reader

I think it's a good statement. But I also recognize a dangerous dystopian world with only one render implementation. The competition between Trident/Gecko/Webkit/Presto pushed the web forward, not a single one of them — the whole process has done it.

At the same time I do understand from a developer perspective that a single "runtime" would be the Holy Grail at least as much as a single OS. But that's what standard stand for.

In the actual situation a vendor can implement things directly in their project, trying to push things forward for its benefit, in contrast to the competitors. If we lose this appeal, will we lose the traction the web has?

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> But that's what standard stand for.

Except that standards still tend to get implemented differently, which is a massive shame. My life long dream is to develop once, deploy everywhere. We're getting there with libraries such as jQuery and Backbone.js however we're still a long way away from that whilst there are multiple browsers to contend with.

Without any aggressive intent, how could Backbone improve your cross-environment problems? It's just an MVC pattern implementation, it doesn't abstract you from nothing.

Backbone.Router working on non-pushState browsers is one example.

_touché_

(You shouldn't resort to hash-bang, btw, it's considered a bad pattern)

Oh, I know. The main reason I'm aware of it is from having to work around and disable it!

Absolutely, exactly.

Thats why folks at whatwg.org spent so much time trying to define how html should be parsed. Alas, that still does not fix the problem with different vendors implementing different parts of the same specification.

Every vendor has its own needs and priorities. Would we be happy with a single implementation with incomplete support for a spec feature and no other implementation on the table? It's a possible scenario, in a WebKit only world.

Don't get me wrong, I love WebKit, I love Chrome, but I also love Gecko AND Presto. They're doing a terrific work that must be rewarded.

>I think it's a good statement. But I also recognize a dangerous dystopian world with only one render implementation. The competition between Trident/Gecko/Webkit/Presto pushed the web forward, not a single one of them — the whole process has done it.

What competition with Trident? Trident was already stagnant when Gecko started.

And it's not like Gecko added anything significant.

All of them mostly copied Webkit's innovations (canvas, css transformations, a strong push to pass the ACID3 test, JITed javascript engine, etc).

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