If you somehow haven’t heard of it, Google’s Chrome is a neat, quick, Acid2-compliant “browser” designed to work with web applications, not web pages.
Chrome certainly looks like a modern browser, with tabs along the top and an address bar and a “Most visited” home screen, it will seem familiar to anyone who’s moved past Internet Explorer 6.
And yet, my Twittersphere has been full of comments like “Nice, but not nice enough to make me drop Firefox/Safari.”
While there are some visual improvements, such as an extremely small “chrome” (the parts of the browser around the page area) footprint, the big changes are “under the hood.” Chrome is built for tabs—each tab is an isolated process; no one tab can take down the whole browser—and is built for JavaScript-heavy “web 2.0″ apps—Chrome’s new V8 JavaScript engine executes a full order of magnitude faster than the current browsers, in my experience.
And all of those “under the hood” changes are open source.
Chrome is not a browser.
Chrome is Google’s way of making a point: modern web browsers have not kept up with the web itself.
More and more, the web is becoming an interactive application, and most browsers are not built for it. They display pages, and running applications is an afterthought. While we’ve seen huge improvements in JavaScript execution in the past few years, speed is still a limitation for developers. Applications are also much more likely to crash than static pages (go ahead, just try to crash a browser with just malformed HTML) and isolating tabs will give necessary boosts to speed, stability, and security.
Kris Abel of CTV.ca said it best: “Google’s entire business takes place throughout the internet itself and so they see their interests served regardless of which company takes web browsing to the next level, in fact they see their interests served if all companies do exactly that.”
I’m not switching to Chrome. I doubt very many people will find it useful as a primary browser. I don’t expect many user-interface improvements, like Firefox’s vast add-on library or the accessibility features of Firefox 3, Opera or IE8.
I do expect any future version to have more “under the hood” improvements, and I hope that the makers of Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer, and any new browsers that spring from this, will re-evaluate their own products and move in this direction.
Because when the browsers get better, the web gets better.
Looking at WordPress themes usually makes me cringe. It’s as if there was a memo on semantic markup and the community of WP developers didn’t get it.
Some themes waste kilobytes of HTML source on something that could be achieved with 75% less markup. Some use blatantly non-compliant code. Almost none use semantic names.
But what really irks me—I’ll cop to using meaningless code to make it look good—is the style of CSS that seems to be spreading: breaking up definitions into a half-dozen chunks, no line breaks, lack of organization. I think their heart is in the right place (a section for colors, so don’t have to worry about layout; a section for typography, so the precious padding is protected) but the result is a horrid mess.
I blame Michael Heilemann, the designer behind the bland and semantic-free default WordPress theme. I imagine theme developers, many just starting with HTML and CSS, started by looking at his code, and thought that was the way to do it. Then it spread like a virus.
Here’s an example from “Autumn Concept 1.0″:
#topbar {background-color: #4b7c44;}
#footer {background-color: #4b7c44;}
#mainpicinner {height: 250px; background: «
url(images/mainpic01.jpg) top left «
no-repeat #fff; border: 1px solid #fff;}
/* typography */
#logo a {color: #3a4032;}
.textbkg {border-left: 4px solid #ebf0cf;}
(« is an inserted linebreak.)
Wow. Line breaks? Readability? Was this passed through a bad version of JSMin?
This is from the “Color Scheme” section, but the first directive for #mainpicinner is height. It also has a border, not just border-color but the whole thing. What’s the point of having sections if you proceed to ignore them immediately?
The rest is filled with classes like cols01 and box01 (while there are other cols##, there is no box02).
But that isn’t my real problem. My real problem is about 20 lines further down:
body {position: relative; background: #1f1f1f; «
font: 70% Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, «
sans-serif; text-align: center; letter-spacing: 0;}
#container {float: left; display: block; width: 100%;}
#topbar {float: left; display: block; width: «
100%; background-image: url(images/topbar.png); «
background-position: top; background-repeat: «
repeat-x; text-align: left; padding: 13px 0 6px 0;}
#topbar div {padding-bottom: 0;}
#container is back. (As are backgrounds. Pick a spot, already!)
This kind of CSS is hard to read, hard to maintain, and hard to customize. Even if the initial version is perfect—which doesn’t exist—things will start to break as soon as someone opens the file. Even in this published style sheet, the author couldn’t decide if background images and borders belonged in “Color Scheme” or “General Styles.” What chance does a maintainer have?
I am, admittedly, obsessively strict with my style sheets. I like to make very sure that every style affects only what I intend it to affect. But I never let the styles for one element single get broken into two places. Instead, what I try to do is keep similar styles in a similar order inside those blocks:
blockquote.dropquote {
float: right; font-family: Arial, «
Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 130%;
color: #662020;
background-color: #ddd;
}
div.login {
position: absolute;
top: 0;
left: 0;
font-size: 80%;
color: #fff;
}
Get the idea? Within each selector, I try to keep things in the same order. I almost always keep positioning styles first and then do either typography or color. To me, this is much more readable and maintainable. If my header div is 3 pixels too wide, I don’t have to comb through all the #header sections. I go to one place and fix it.
I like to extract the CSS order from the document order. This doesn’t necessarily stay complete or strict, especially when you have classes that can be used anywhere or you’re controlling tags directly. The header styles do come before the content styles, though, which come before the footer styles. That just makes sense.
Am I the only one who can’t stand this “style” of CSS? Do you use it? Why?
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We all complained, and Microsoft listened to the community: IE8 will now render in IE8-mode by default, and “developers who want their pages shown using IE8’s “IE7 Standards mode” will need to request that explicitly.”
Obviously, this is good news for all forward-looking, standards-aware, progressively-enhancing developers out there.
But even more important is the action from Microsoft: the community voiced an opinion and Microsoft listened and responded. To see any major corporation rethink their position because of community pressure is rare enough, but to see a complete reversal is truly an occasion to celebrate.
Hopefully this is indicative of a new attitude at Microsoft, one that supports or even embraces standards and the goals of progressive enhancement.
Now that we’ve seen what community outrage can do, we should turn our attention to the closed platforms of the iPhone and PSP. It’s a long shot but we can try!
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