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Dear website users,

We feel your pain. It may not seem like it since we develop ever more complicated UI schemes to overcome the W3C's frankenstandards (seriously, who comes up with a coordinate system based on a 'nominal arms length away' from the screen and then creates another set of units for mobile. I know there's a lot of smart people who contribute great data standards from the W3C, but when it came to presentation standards they either 1) completely forgot their linear algebra or 2) didn't bother to look at Postcript's coordinate system or both).

Some of us are reinventing the browser as it should have been written (with polyfills and shims), but this will take a while to get right. (For those that remember, Alan Kay originally said there should be no browser, just a code container, we are once again getting close to something he said decades before).

We understand that the W3C has set the expectation that everything bad on the web happens because of us devs not following their "standards" (even when alt changes to title changes to picture caption in as many years), but at some point it might be worth asking them "why are your presentation standards so inconsistent and hard to follow?"

Sincerely,

A webdev who is tired of cajoling CSS and JS to reinvent the same god-damned three column layout that should have worked in the 90's (oh wait, you didn't realize that Postscript predates the web? Yes, yes it did. So the W3C could have sought presentation layer experts of its time in drafting presentation standards, but didn't).



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