Over at Wired’s Webmonkey, Scott Gilbertson argues persuasively that we’re falling back into an old trap. Before, it was sites that only worked in one browser — IE6.
But, while IE6 may be a thing of the past, the root problem — websites that work in one and only one web browser — sadly, remains.
This time the culprit is WebKit, the rendering engine that powers the browsers on the iPhone, iPad, and Android phones. But what’s different about this round of monoculture is that, unlike IE 6, the WebKit developers haven’t done anything wrong. It’s web developers that have created the WebKit-only web.
Instead of writing code that will work in any browser, which might mean adding an extra three lines of code to their CSS rules, some of even the largest sites on the web are coding exclusively for WebKit.
The problem is bad enough that on Monday at the CSS Working Group meeting, Microsoft, Mozilla and Opera announced that each are planning to add support for some -webkit prefixed CSS properties. In other words, because web developers are using only the -webkit prefix, other browsers must either add support for -webkit or risk being seen as less capable browsers even when they aren’t.
Meanwhile, Chris Heilman is fighting this trend two-fisted, with Pre-fix the web. He and his like-minded compatriots are finding project on Github that are WebKit-only, then forking the code and adding support for other browsers. Hats off to them!