Web specifications supported in Opera 8

web-platform-tests dashboard

It’s great to see browsers working together to collectively implement a range of much-needed features.

These scores represent how browser engines are doing in 15 focus areas and 3 joint investigation efforts.

Coming to a browser near you - faster than ever before!

A great long-term perspective from Rachel on the pace of change in standards getting shipped in browsers:

The pace that things are shipping, and at which bugs are fixed is like nothing we have seen before. I know from sitting around a table with representatives from each browser vendor at the CSS Working Group how important interop is. No-one wants features to be implemented differently in browsers. This is what we were asking for with WaSP, and despite the new complexity of the platform, browsers rendering standard features in different ways is becoming increasingly rare. Bugs happen, sometimes in the browser and sometimes in the spec, but there is a commitment to avoid these and to create a stable platform we can all rely on. It is exciting to be part of it.

Web Components: The Long Game – Infrequently Noted

One of the things we’d hoped to enable via Web Components was a return to ctrl-r web development. At some level of complexity and scale we all need tools to help cope with code size, application structure, and more. But the tender, loving maintainance of babel and webpack and NPM configurations that represents a huge part of “front end development” today seems…punitive. None of this should be necessary when developing one (or a few) components and composing things shouldn’t be this hard. The sophistication of the tools needs to get back to being proportional with the complexity of the problem at hand.

I completely agree with Alex here. But that’s also why I was surprised and disheartened when I linked to Monica’s excellent introduction to web components that a package manager seemed to be a minimum requirement.

Old CSS, new CSS / fuzzy notepad

I absolutely love this in-depth history of the web, written in a snappy, snarky tone.

In the beginning, there was no CSS.

This was very bad.

Even if you—like me—lived through all this stuff, I guarantee there’ll still be something in here you didn’t know.

A Sliding Nightmare: Understanding the Range Input | CSS-Tricks

Ana goes into exhaustive detail on all the differences in the shadow DOM and styling of input type="range" across browsers.

I’m totally fine with browsers providing different styling for complex UI elements like this, but I wish they’d at least provide a consistent internal structure and therefore a consistent way of over-riding the default styles. Maybe then people wouldn’t be so quick to abandon native elements like this in favour building their own UI components from scratch—the kind of over-engineering that inevitably ends up being under-engineered.