Alex continues on truthiness with The W3C Cannot Save Us that follows on from the CSS uprising as we watch things crash and burn.
Alex discusses the Opera case (how it is a bad idea), and how Opera could be more productive.
He calls out how we can't hide behind the "let's just make IE work with standards better" line:
In order for the future to be better by a large amount, it must be different by a large amount.
Until we get some great new (non-standard) CSS features out Mozilla, Opera, and IE nothing will get better to the extent that we will again be optimistic about the future (Safari earns a pass). The size of the improvements they deliver in the future are directly tied to our expectations of how different the future will be. Only when there are large and divergent ideas of how to proceed expressed through competing, successful implementations will standardization really work to whatever extent that it can reasonably be expected to.
Let that sink in a bit. To get a better future, not only do we need a return to “the browser wars”, we need to applaud and use the hell out of “non-standard” features until such time as there’s a standard to cover equivalent functionality. Non-standard features are the future, and suggesting that they are somehow “bad” is to work against your own self-interest.
Web developers everywhere need to start burning their standards advocacy literature and start telling their browser vendors to give them the new shiny. Do we want things to work the same everywhere? Of course, but we’ve got plenty of proof to suggest that only healthy browser competition is going to get us there. Restructuring the CSS WG or expecting IE8 to be “fully standards compliant” is a fools game.
*listens to a beating drum*
