There’s so much great stuff written about web standards available for free on the web that it’s easy to forget how much bad stuff is also out there; and how many people are willing to support it just because it’s easier than putting in a little extra effort to follow best practice.
Over the weekend one of the most popular stories on Delicious.com was teaching the use of lazy CSS hacks, the type of which I thought everybody was convinced enough to do away with; the star and underscore hacks for targeting IE6 & IE7, the hacks which we’ve been saying (for years) shouldn’t be used anymore.
Disregarding the ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’, and the validation argument — some of my stylesheets don’t validate, and there are good reasons for that — I’d like to give a few other reasons why using this method is not a good idea.
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The uncanny valley is a term from the world of robotics, which states that when something appears almost perfect, it can cause a negative reaction*. Or, to be more precise:
The uncanny valley hypothesis holds that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers.
Source: Wikipedia
I’m talking about the uncanny valley in regards to creating prototypes, so revulsion may be too strong a term; but I think the principle still applies.
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As Firefox 3.5 brings open video to the web, the W3C decide to drop codec requirements from the HTML 5 spec, citing disagreement between browser makers and concern over patents. Luckily, there’s a way to make video for everybody, which means encoding each clip only twice.