Attention web developers: you are breaking the web

It sounds like something from a galaxy far, far away, but in truth it was not that long ago that the web was littered with sites that proudly proclaimed “works best in Internet Explorer.” Thankfully those days are over. IE6 no longer dominates the web.

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.

Web developers have created a 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.

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The cloud’s time to shine

It’s time to start building web apps. Native apps nowadays only have a handful of advantages compared to web based alternatives, but with new APIs and technologies are being developed to make web development better, we should start moving our apps to the cloud. A web version of Flipboard and Sparrow would provide cross-platform and easy way to distribute your app, which I may point out are already web centric as it is. It is only through the collective actions of developers the web and the future can move forward, but being stuck in native iOS and Android development, you are not only depriving other users of using your service, but also doing double the work. The web is the future, let’s bring it forward now.