

The Unwelcome Return of “Best Viewed With Internet Explorer” - cwan
http://technologizer.com/2010/09/16/the-unwelcome-return-of-best-viewed-with-internet-explorer/

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Sidnicious
We're better than the 90s! The cutting-edge-features-that-only-work-in-some-
browsers today _aren't_ proprietary (à la ActiveX) and will eventually make it
into every browser.

I read an article a while back (anyone have a link?) that argued that "best
viewed with" _helped_ push browsers and the web forward tremendously. IE 9 is
evidence that it's happening again.

HTML5 could really use feature publication — if authors could easily detect
support for next-generation features (`if(!document.support.canvas){
tellUserAboutNewBrowsers(); }`), they might be less likely to lock out
browsers by name.

~~~
MarkPilgrim
You mean like <http://diveintohtml5.org/detect.html> ?

~~~
Sidnicious
Yes, and I love you for it!

Guides like yours (and Modernizr) are a case _for_ browsers to make feature
detection available through a Modernizr-like API.

We're having to get very, very creative to detect support for some features
(e.g. writing data to an <input> and seeing if it sticks — it took a while
before someone, Mike Taylor, iirc, figured that one out), and we're _trusting_
that every new feature will be indirectly, accidentally detectable.

I'd much rather there was a standard way for a browser to say, "yep, I support
this".

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castis
Well in defense of that. There are several sites out there that only work
google chrome.

Granted, most of them are just "look what can be done with awesome javascript"
but still :/

