alt Hacker NewsIs this increasing complexity in the Web layout world worth it? Anyone who wants to use this is going to drop support for older browsers (and, in so doing, older machines that can't run newer OSes and newer browsers).
Personally, I use an 11-year-old machine and have had to add userscript hacks to certain major Web sites to work around bugs in CSS grid (not the "lanes" described here).
At least new JavaScript features can be "polyfilled" or whatever. Maybe sites could check for CSS feature support too? But they seem not to.
For example, the demo page linked in the article fails pretty unusably for me. All the images take up nearly the full viewport width.
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I am using a machine older than eleven years old and can still run the newest version of Firefox and Chrome.
I don't think the world needs to cater to people that refuse even basic internet hygiene.
> Personally, I use an 11-year-old machine and have had to add userscript hacks to certain major Web sites to work around bugs in CSS grid (not the "lanes" described here).
The version of CSS Grid we're using today didn't ship until 2017; a browser from 11 years ago would be using one of the non-standard versions of Grid. For example, Internet Explorer 11 was the first browser to ship a grid implementation.
> At least new JavaScript features can be "polyfilled" or whatever. Maybe sites could check for CSS feature support too?
First, not every site needs to look exactly the same in every browser; that's why progressive enhancement is a thing.
Second, there are multiple ways to create masonry-style layouts that don't require masonry support in the browser using multi-column layout or flexbox.
Third, masonry can be polyfilled using JavaScript [1].
When the web came out it itself was new technology that excluded some older machines. Lynx kind of worked (I used it!) but it was a poor substitute, especially once `<img>` showed up.
You want to platform to be able to make progress and not be frozen in amber by what we had at some "magical" year when things were in some Golidlocks powerful enough but not too complex state. Especially since a lot of progress lately has been fixing long-standing inconsistencies and obvious gaps.
The cost of that is that yes, neither my Apple IIe or my Micro Pentium 90 run the modern web... one day my MBP M1 won't either.
Not updating your browser will net you tons of exploitable vulnerabilities.
How do you expect things to ever change if no one ever updates? Certainly even if you decide to lean towards maximum support it’s still a positive these features are being introduced so you can use them in 10 years.
> Is this increasing complexity in the Web layout world worth it?
Yes. I held off learning about CSS Grid for a very long time and as soon as I did I was converted. Sometimes I think the web doesn’t get enough credit for its ambition: mobile viewports, desktop viewports, touch interaction, pointer interaction, complex documents, webapps… it’s a lot. But you get some complexity as a side effect. The complexity we do see these days isn’t invented out of whole cloth, it’s standardising and improving layouts people are implementing with JavaScript, often badly.
> Is this increasing complexity in the Web layout world worth it? Anyone who wants to use this is going to drop support for older browsers (and, in so doing, older machines that can't run newer OSes and newer browsers).
If you’ve been at this for a while, it’s important to remember that browsers update a lot faster than they used to. Anchor positioning came out last year, for example, and all of the major browsers support it by now. Very old devices are a problem but security is purging those out faster than used to be the case.
We also have better tools for progressive adoption since you can easily query for things like CSS feature support. In this demo, they didn’t implement fallbacks but in most real sites you’d have something like a basic grid layout which is perfectly serviceable for the fraction of users on old Firefox releases.
> Maybe sites could check for CSS feature support too? But they seem not to.
Certainly can: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/A...
What does the age of your machine have to do with browser compatibility issues? Are you running a stale OS and a stale browser on that OS?
If enough consumers aren't able to use the website, then business wouldn't use it. The reality is new computers aren't that expensive (I see used M1s for under 1k) and consumers are upgrading.
Yes it is. Developers write bad code when they try to work around the lack of features with ill thought out hacks, this results in a bad website for everybody, even those of us that keep our software up to date, and just so happen to have a different screen resolution and a different browser then what the developer tested on.
> I use an 11-year-old machine
What OS are you running that can't run modern versions of browsers, and on what hardware?
Current Chrome runs on Windows 10, which came out 9.5 years ago but was intended to run on older computers, and macOS Monterey, which runs on Macs from ~2014-2015 depending on the model. But even Big Sur before that, the most recent version of Chrome which runs on that is Chrome 138 from just 6 months ago, and that doesn't seem old enough that you need to build userscript hacks.
I'm really curious what you're actually running. Generally speaking, an 11-year-old desktop should be able to run the current browser, and if not, a very recent one.