Walter van HolstSo, after half an hour fighting with the European Commission's website to provide feedback on the draft-proposal of the Cyber Resilience Act, I tried in Chromium and went through swimmingly. What does this tell us about how serious the EU institutions are about reigning in Google's quas-monopoly if the same institutions cannot be arsed to make their websites work on browsers like Mozilla Firefox?
Sparr@whvholst How many other browsers (or, more specifically, rendering and/or javascript engines) did you try on? Two data points doesn't give much indication of their standards support.
Shiide
Matthew Lariz@sparr @shiide @whvholst that sounds like a perfect plan for stifling innovation and competition. While we're at it, cars should avoid adding safety features so people don't get confused about which car they are driving and all cars will fit in all garages, and it follows that buildings should all look the same, so no one gets confused about where the doors and light switches are, or where they should park.
@Matthewlariz @shiide @whvholst Adding features is potentially orthogonal to breaking standards. Nothing I said implied features shouldn't be added.
@Matthewlariz @shiide @whvholst New features being implemented as extensions (like the -moz-* styles) is one of the better options. Browser detection can also work, although it tends to lead to other bad behavior.
@sparr @shiide @whvholst browser detection is *literally* coding for the browsers... It's in the term itself. Even you use it to default to a basic page, you have made accommodations for users who aren't using the browser you wrote the rest of the site for. This is exactly the type of thing that would be used to address OPs issue, rather than your own position. Coding to, for example, the -moz- extensions is still coding to a specific browser, or worse a specific extension of that browser.
@Matthewlariz @shiide @whvholst You have it backwards. If you "you wrote the rest of the site for [that browser]", that's where you've gone wrong. Write the standards compliant site first. Then write exceptions / additions / addons for specific browser(s) if you feel compelled to.
@sparr @shiide @whvholst Nope. Including browser detection exclusively for a basic default is coding for browsers other than the one you prefer customers to use, IE giving consideration in your code for those browsers, IE coding to those browsers. I hate absolutes, but I think *any other* use is specifically so you can do coding for specific browsers.
@Matthewlariz @shiide @whvholst There's nothing wrong with writing some code for specific browsers. The problem is making your website dependent on it. That's why the -moz extensions are great. I can make a page with blue text in every browser, and translucent blue text in mozilla. Everyone can use it, but it's slightly nicer in the one browser that provides a useful extension.
@Matthewlariz @shiide @whvholst No. Make your site follow standards. If it "doesn't work" in a particular browser, file a bug report. Then, if you really feel the need to, you can add code to make it work in that specific browser. But don't blame the site or the compliant browser for the broken browser being broken.
@sparr @shiide @whvholst what broken browser are you referring to? Did you lose track of the conversation? It is entirely possible for a site to be compliant with standards and still have non standardized features that don't work correctly across browsers. Standards don't generally exclude a site from including extra-standard features.
I think you should have exited this conversation many post ago, but you can go ahead and keep trying to find a way to sound right. I'm done doing this with you.
Hippo 🍉@shiide @whvholst can I step in here? I think you're both right in some ways but the main question to ask here is:
Was the EU site broken because Firefox couldn't handle a standard feature, or because the EU site used a non-standard (maybe Chrome-only) feature?
If Firefox couldn't handle a standard feature, then it's a Firefox problem like @sparr is saying. But if EU used a non-standard feature that worked on Chrome but not Firefox, then it's the EU's responsibility as @Matthewlariz described.
@badrihippo @shiide @whvholst @sparr
Okay you win. Good night, mastodon.
@badrihippo @shiide @whvholst @sparr yes. The goal isn't, or shouldn't be to "be right" in the conversation but rather for everyone to "be right" at the end.
@shiide @whvholst @Matthewlariz we can't really pass judgement before we know which of them it was (which I'm guessing is why @sparr advocated testing in more browsers).
Of course, the issue still stands that there's practically only three and a half data points possible in total, unless we want to actually analyse the code and compare it to the standards document.
Ironically the world needs more browser diversity to allow for a single standard 🙁
@badrihippo @shiide @whvholst @sparr i wasn't actually arguing what you seem to think i was, about what was broken. I framed my comments around the example case OP had, but my comments are solely aimed at the silly assertion that web-devs shouldn't "support browsers" in their sites. I don't disagree with many of sparr's points on their own, but those points are off target in the context of trying to make their original assertion correct.
@Matthewlariz to be fair, I think that's *theoretically* a good idea (supporting standards, not browsers) although you need *some* browser to test with. And yes, maybe not necessary to bring it up here...
@badrihippo @shiide @whvholst @sparr Standards are great. However not all design objectives are compatible, and even sparr backtracked a bit in my opinion in saying that there's no wrong in writing code for specific browsers, but generally here they elide the fact that, even if all of the standards are met, there is still room to do things...
@badrihippo @shiide @whvholst @sparr that don't work in browsers that ONLY support standards. Further, the point they argued against was that the EU should work to support browsers other than the one they are criticizing for monopolistic practice.
In theory, if we didn't support browsers at all ("should never have been a thing") then innovation is slowed to the pace of standards development and adoption.
@badrihippo @shiide @whvholst @sparr ... At that point the reasons to have multiple browsers would be whittled down to something like bug avoidance and cosmetics.
@Matthewlariz @shiide @whvholst @sparr I think what the EU needs to realise is that the W3C spec, not Chrome, is the standard to be followed (and one way to do that is to test it against other browsers such as Firefox)
@badrihippo @shiide @sparr @Matthewlariz It threw an internal server error - too many connections. Which distinctly points away from a Firefox problem.
@badrihippo @whvholst @shiide @sparr I don't think that's necessarily true, is it? Bad code could cause too many connections to be spawned, no?