Bert Bos on CSS3

October 23rd, 2007 by Peter Gasston 5 comments, leave your own »

Too many people see the Web a bit like television: who ever heard of incompatible content? If there is an error, it’s because the TV set is broken, or maybe the antenna. On the Web, it is much more likely that the content is invalid, but try to explain that to users who just want to buy their holiday or see their bank account…

A very interesting interview with Bert Bos, on the history and future of CSS.

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October 23rd, 2007 by Peter Gasston in Interviews, W3C. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Comments to “Bert Bos on CSS3”

  1. David Storey Says:
    October 24th, 2007 at 7:53 am

    It was a great interview, but the quote The smaller browsers can sometimes do small improvements, but mostly they wait for the big ones to take the hit and educate the users. was a bit unfair. Opera generally do it the other way around, and we are often too strict to the standard, so have to evangelise about why things break, when they work in other browsers. We don’t wait for them to take the it and follow them. Web Forms 2 is an example of a technology we added first, that is designed to be backwards compatible, but in practice isn’t 100% that way du to sites using custom attributes for validation and such. We took the hit and reached out to sites that broke due to this. There are quite a lot of other examples too. Capturing events in addEventListener is another example.

  2. Peter Gasston Says:
    October 25th, 2007 at 11:07 am

    David: Do you really consider Opera to be a smaller browser? :)

  3. fearphage Says:
    October 26th, 2007 at 2:36 am

    I think most people would consider sub 1% market share to be a smaller browser.

  4. Ain Tohvri Says:
    October 27th, 2007 at 9:46 pm

    Opera has definitely put a browser scene a step forward. It can’t be underestimated.

    Considering a market share is 1 thing but in the technological point of view I have to agree the above statement. Who brought in tabs and when did these appear on IE, the biggest player on the market? And the status of CSS2.1 in IE is also widely known. What hit exactly are we talking about apart from security flaws, non-standard rendering and awkward framework?

  5. David Storey Says:
    November 1st, 2007 at 1:12 am

    Peter: In terms of influence on the industry no, but in real terms we are are small company. Certainly when you consider our rivals; Apple, Microsoft and Google.

    We are growing fast though.

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