aleksanteri's blog

Today I was wondering about these modern CSS properties that call themselves "standards". There's all this fancy stuff, text-overflow, inline-block, ellipsis and so on. But then; there's a ton of browsers, not just IE, Safari, Opera and Firefox. There's Konqueror, Epiphany, hv3 (a browser based on tkhtml), etc... And if there's a site which uses these, at least one of these browsers won't display it correctly. I'm taking that as "enough to ruin a standard".

I recently made a small site for my freetime project t2i and I only needed font (for defining size, family and weight), color and background-color. Yet it displays quite good for me in ALL browsers I can get my hands on.

My CSS happens to be this small:

body {
font-family: sans-serif;
background-color: #111;
color: #EEE;
}

#leftbar {
width: 155px;
}

#head {
font-style: italic;
}

a, a:visited { color: #08F; }
a:hover { color: white; }

My point is: why do people nowadays need such properties that claim to be standards but in a way aren't? Why don't sites just use these "basic building blocks" instead of using elements that ruin the sites in minor browsers?

Comments welcome