By Christian Heilmann CHAPTER 3What do we do to achieve that? Every time a new technology comes out
we polyfill and patch and add libraries to give that technology to browsers
that should not be used any longer. We base this on the misconception that
the premise of the Web is to give everybody the same experience. Most of
the time, this is not our idea but one our managers, clients or project plan
dictate. We try to make the experience of those using outdated technology
as amazing as possible, because we consider it wrong to leave them with
less than those users who have up-to-date environments that keep getting
updated. This is not what the Web is about. No one forces us to support
outdated technology with features readily available in newer technology.
The premise of the Web is to deliver content to everybody regardless of
ability, technical capabilities and knowledge, or geographical location. Web
technologies allow us to do that, but only when we use them wisely and
don’t try to give everyone the same experience, leaving us all disappointed
as we race to cater to the lowest common denominator.
We seem to be obsessed with the question, “Will this work in browser
X?” and use all kinds of tricks and workarounds to make it work. We waste
a lot of effort on unsatisfying results and this increases our frustration. If
we give functionality to a browser by means of a hack or workaround, we
also take it on ourselves to keep supporting and testing in this browser.
More rewarding would be to ask, “What does not work in this browser?” and
then use the answer to define which supported technologies we’ll apply.
When you include a style sheet these days, you don’t worry at all about
browsers that don’t support CSS — you know that browsers will only apply
what they understand, so there is no chance of it causing any trouble. A
compass needle pointing south is as useful as one that points in the right
direction — you just need to use it correctly.
A great example of this is the Smashing Magazine website. It uses re-
sponsive design using CSS media queries. These aren’t supported by OldIE
which is why, originally, the website employed a JavaScript patch called
respond.js to make older versions of IE also switch designs around when
the screen size changed.