Peering into a browser developer’s mind

[ktinkel]

I stumbled across the Surfin’ Safari webblog of Dave Hyatt a (the?) developer of Safari, the Mac web browser.

He was discussing a particular aspect of the CSS float spec that he was sure ought to be interpreted a particular way (“B”). The Gecko developers had opted for interpretation “A” — and MSIE applied both of them in different cases.

I have no great understanding of this particular issue, but thought Dave’s discussion — along with comments from people who read his blog — was enlightening. The CSS spec may be imperfectly written, or is ambiguous in some places. Developers must decide how to implement this ambiguous standard.

It sheds a slightly oblique light on the “standards” debate.

I found the blog when reading about the WaSP Acid2 browser test — Hyatt decided to rework Safari so it would render the test image correctly (like Firefox, MSIE 5, and most or all other browsers, version 1.3 does not do so). He got quite a way along when he discovered an error in the test, and stopped. That discussion is also interesting.