Not updating your browser will net you tons of exploitable vulnerabilities.
How do you expect things to ever change if no one ever updates? Certainly even if you decide to lean towards maximum support it’s still a positive these features are being introduced so you can use them in 10 years.
> How do you expect things to ever change if no one ever updates?
Maybe things should stop changing.
We don't really need ten new CSS attributes every year. Things work. The elegant solution is to announce the project is done. That would bring some much-needed stability. Then we can focus on keeping things working.
The issue with this is that the browser is the cross-playing operating system, the VM that runs webapps. But we treat the platform like an evolving document format. If we want to declare it complete, we need to make it extensible so we can have a stable core without freezing capabilities. I foresee all of this CSS/HTML stuff as eventually being declared a sort of legacy format and adding a standard way to ship pluggable rendering engines/language runtimes. WASM is one step in that direction. There are custom rendering/layout engines now, but they basically have to render to canvas and lose a lot of performance and platform integration. Proper official support for such engines with hooks into accessibility features and the like could close that gap. Of course, then you have every website shipping a while OS userland for every pageload, kinda like containers on servers, but that overhead could probably be mitigated with some caching of tagged dependencies. Then you have unscrupulous types who might use load timings to detect cache state for user profiling... I'm sure there's a better solution for that than just disabling cross-site caching...
> I foresee all of this CSS/HTML stuff as eventually being declared a sort of legacy format and adding a standard way to ship pluggable rendering engines/language runtimes.
I doubt this is going to happen as long as backwards compatibility continues to be W3C's north star. That's why all current browsers can still render the first website created by TBL in 1989.
Sure, official support for certain extensions should happen but HTML/CSS will always be at the core.
11 years ago we had Python 2.7.8 and 3.4.0 so no type hints, no async await, no match syntax, no formatted string literals, large number couldn’t be written like this 13_370_000_000, etc.
I agree they do. But Python is a bad counterexample. You can upgrade your Python on your server and no one has to know about it. But if you want to use new CSS features, then every browser has to implement that feature and every user has to upgrade their browser.
The intent of my comment was to express a desire to stabilize the web API in particular, not to freeze all software development in its tracks.
But people ship python software, just like they ship CSS software, and python is bundled in many operating systems. When somebody ships e.g. a CLI tool to manipulate subtitle files, and it uses a language feature from python 3.9, that somebody is excluding you from running it on your 11 year old system.
People get new browser versions for free, there are more important things to thing about than users that for some reason don‘t want to upgrade. Like I would rather have my layout done quickly with nice elegant code (and no hacks) and spend my extra time developing an excellent UX for my users that rely on assistive technology.
Note that your wish for stabilization was delivered by the CSSWG with the @supports rule. Now developers can use new features without breaking things for users on older browser. So if a developer wants to use `display: grid-lanes` they can put it in an @supports clause. However if you are running firefox 45 (released in May 2016; used by 0.09% of the global users) @supports will not work and my site will not work on your browser. I—and most developers—usually don’t put things in an @support clause that passes "last 2 version, not dead, > 0.2%"
There are two kinds of technologies: those that change to meet user needs, and those that have decided to start dying and being replaced by technologies that change to meet user needs.
You can get a free cert from letsencrypt using their dns challenge. No need to expose to the internet. Add a DNS record that points to the address of your LAN and it’ll make things even easier for your guests.
Not interested in going through the effort of setting up a DNS record, go through the whole DNS challenge process, and go through a periodic manual renewal process, for every stupid little thing (many even just temporary things which don't even have a static DHCP lease). There's literally no advantage for my use case, except that I'd be allowed by the web standard bodies to use their shiny new toys that they artificially lock away otherwise.
For the permanent installation case, it's typically easier to use mDNS domains since they're shorter. 'mediapc.local' is easier for guests to type than 'mediapc.local.mort.coffee' or whatever I'd end up with.
What would be a good solution is self-signed certificates, but that too is a non-option until all browser vendors downgrade the warning from a "Someone is trying to hack you!" style scare screen to a more informative "this is a self signed certificate, do you trust it?" style warning screen.
I would be perfectly happy with a solution where browsers show a scare screen for self-signed certificates on the public internet but a benign-looking "Do you want to trust this certificate?" screen for 192.168.0.0/16, 10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12 or mDNS .local domains.
Even if it is intended as a hint to human observers, during a big scandal in my country a few years ago turned out all the gov officials where blindly following the computer advise. Many where falsely accused of fraud by tax authorities, almost all where from ethnic minorities.
I agree with you on the subjects are boring rich people, if we judge it with today standards. For the time it was actually quite unique that (upper) middle class people could get their portrait done, and not just nobles.
I like to think of it as part of a period of history where the merchants start to gain power from the aristocracy and that shows in what gets passed down to us.
It reflects a great change in Western society, which really began to flourish first in the Netherlands, where the merchant and industrial classes began to be dominant, and were growing sick of pretending it wasn't true.
Mostly in Britain these days, we see the final pretenses of the nobility on display.
Holland is really where the wealthy merchant class first became dominant in Europe--and was generally not subservient to the nobility as in other other countries.
Additionally you can use Tailscale for added convenience. Tailscale is a payed service, for a simple home server you can get away with the free plan and their mobile apps work rather well.
Not affiliated with Tailscale at all just shouting them out because they do make things very easy and I often recommend them to hobbyist.
How do you expect things to ever change if no one ever updates? Certainly even if you decide to lean towards maximum support it’s still a positive these features are being introduced so you can use them in 10 years.