> There's a standard for most things happening in a browser, which means that things look pixel-perfectly the same on a huge amount of browsers <snip>he browser is basically what the JVM tried to be, a write once work anywhere solution that is pretty well sandboxed. It's miles better than pretty much every other cross-platform piece of tooling in existence.
That's a good theory. My experience as a consumer of web sites across chrome, firefox, chrome on mobile, and firefox on mobile leaves me with a perspective more aligned with reality than theory. The same pages vary widely across these platforms. It's not uncommon for form fields to be illegible on one or more of them, layout is different, readability is different.
Maybe once we get that little problem ironed out (whether it be people building websites badly or things aren't as compatible as they should be, I don't know) we can talk about taking it further...
I feel a little twinge every time I hear someone say that something on The Web should be or is "pixel perfect". That phrase has a particular -and obvious- definition; one that is rarely correct when speaking of a web page that is viewed in more than one browser and/or on more than one machine.
That's a good theory. My experience as a consumer of web sites across chrome, firefox, chrome on mobile, and firefox on mobile leaves me with a perspective more aligned with reality than theory. The same pages vary widely across these platforms. It's not uncommon for form fields to be illegible on one or more of them, layout is different, readability is different.
Maybe once we get that little problem ironed out (whether it be people building websites badly or things aren't as compatible as they should be, I don't know) we can talk about taking it further...