I think similar how the EU adopted the USB-C as mandatory standard for charging, it should force other industries, including software vendors, to follow commonly defined standards.
In case of browsers that is Chrome using it’s de facto monopoly to force other browser to rush to catch up with their custom crap. Yes, as a side effect that would also break a lot of existing webpages because they rely heavily on browser bending over backwards to accommodate sites serving effectively broken HTML i.e. but in the long term this would improve the internet as a whole.
The industry needs to shift to identifying html, css, and JavaScript versions in browser headers instead of which rendering engine. Saying “I support these versions of these standards” instead of “I’m chromium”.
It’s been a problem since day one. Maybe have some sort of independent certification for each browser to pass before being able to declare that it supports a particular version.
You’d have to indicate “I also support these optional bits” for this to really work, which would lead to truly massive headers.
I prefer the idea of slapping people who put up pages that cater to Chrome rather than reading and following the standards upside the head with a large dead fish. People who write faulty WYSIWYG web design software get smacked once for every bad site deployed with their help.
There shouldn’t be any “optional bits”. Thats part of the problem. Either it’s part of a standard or it’s not. Either you meet the standard for that version number, or you don’t.
We don’t even have standards that strong in programming languages or even fucking machine code (ISAs) anymore.
I think I would like to return to that ideal time (if it ever existed), but… I feel like I’m in a vanishingly small minority.
I think it comes down to incentive structure, and the most clear incentives push away from strong stnadards. The big advantage to (a) strong standard(s) is(are) interoperability, but that’s something end users have to demand because it’s an anathema to rent-seeking-behavior (a central facet of surveillance capitalism, choke-point capitalism, enshittification, and technofuedalism). But, even there, natural incentives fail us, since most users get more utility from “innovative” features instead of low switching costs – or at least the think they do until they actually try to exit a platform/service.
The problem is that the standard is fucking huge and maybe your browser supports every feature of version 5xx but is missing a feature related to authentication using guinea pigs introduced in v369. So it would only be allowed to advertise compatibility with v368 even though it can do everything except Guinea pigs.
Realistically you would trim the standard to a core set and advertise compatibility with a version of that and then advertise optional extensions. And that’s optional bits if you ask me.
I think similar how the EU adopted the USB-C as mandatory standard for charging, it should force other industries, including software vendors, to follow commonly defined standards.
In case of browsers that is Chrome using it’s de facto monopoly to force other browser to rush to catch up with their custom crap. Yes, as a side effect that would also break a lot of existing webpages because they rely heavily on browser bending over backwards to accommodate sites serving effectively broken HTML i.e. but in the long term this would improve the internet as a whole.
The industry needs to shift to identifying html, css, and JavaScript versions in browser headers instead of which rendering engine. Saying “I support these versions of these standards” instead of “I’m chromium”.
It’s been a problem since day one. Maybe have some sort of independent certification for each browser to pass before being able to declare that it supports a particular version.
You’d have to indicate “I also support these optional bits” for this to really work, which would lead to truly massive headers.
I prefer the idea of slapping people who put up pages that cater to Chrome rather than reading and following the standards upside the head with a large dead fish. People who write faulty WYSIWYG web design software get smacked once for every bad site deployed with their help.
There shouldn’t be any “optional bits”. Thats part of the problem. Either it’s part of a standard or it’s not. Either you meet the standard for that version number, or you don’t.
We don’t even have standards that strong in programming languages or even fucking machine code (ISAs) anymore.
I think I would like to return to that ideal time (if it ever existed), but… I feel like I’m in a vanishingly small minority.
I think it comes down to incentive structure, and the most clear incentives push away from strong stnadards. The big advantage to (a) strong standard(s) is(are) interoperability, but that’s something end users have to demand because it’s an anathema to rent-seeking-behavior (a central facet of surveillance capitalism, choke-point capitalism, enshittification, and technofuedalism). But, even there, natural incentives fail us, since most users get more utility from “innovative” features instead of low switching costs – or at least the think they do until they actually try to exit a platform/service.
The problem is that the standard is fucking huge and maybe your browser supports every feature of version 5xx but is missing a feature related to authentication using guinea pigs introduced in v369. So it would only be allowed to advertise compatibility with v368 even though it can do everything except Guinea pigs.
Realistically you would trim the standard to a core set and advertise compatibility with a version of that and then advertise optional extensions. And that’s optional bits if you ask me.
A standard is that, a standard. The amount of moving parts (features?) is irrelevant.
Either it’s up to the standard or it isn’t.
Then no browser will be “up to” the last 15 years of the standard as none implement all features.
Correct. That is why we’re talking about having standards and enforcing them. That’s the whole point.
No the point of this discussion is about having one single yes/no question about the standard or a list of features.