Legacy Compatibility: Why The Site Never Looks Exactly Like It Does in the Design

I have high hopes for when the web approaches the phase of dumping backwards compatibility. This phase, when it happens, won't be a single flip of the switch but I imagine will be close to the slow, slow move to IPv6. As everyone knows backward compatibly while often important can also put a real stranglehold on progress. This example cannot be made more clear than see how dropping legacy compatibility helped transform Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X. Even Microsoft is getting the idea and Windows 7 appears to be doing the same. This doesn't mean it won't be without without hiccups, the crutch used by both OS X and Windows is a virtual machine that allows you run legacy code until you can move everything else forward.

I feel the HTML has gotten to the point where the legacy support has become a burden to progress. There are several places where this is evident. Where hacks have been applied to work around fundamentalmentally different uses than what was expected.

The first strong example of this is cookies. HTTP is a stateless protocol, yet when doing something like making an online purchase or maintaining a shopping cart state is very important, this led to cookies in 1994. While the model works, it was created as an innovative solution to the stateless problem it isn't perfect and has problems.

The second place this is really prominent is page layout.
<--[if lte IE 6]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://echodittolabs.org/ie_hacks.css" />
<![endif]-->
Is an example of backwards compatibility code. Couple this with large dynamic sites and Ajax and not only will your site not look like the cut ups from the designers it may not function anymore.
The reason this is broken is because designs are setup to look exactly like look in the proof because that is how it works in the print world, but the original HTML spec didn't plan for this. <em> Doesn't specify a way to render it's contents it just simply tells the browser to emphasize it. In fact a lot of tags leave the "how" up to the browser, CSS "helps" but it is far from perfect. It shouldn't matter, according to the spec, if each browser shows you the page in a different format that is how the system was designed from the get go.

With the recent onslaught of new browsers, think about it everything has a browser now, even video game consoles and phones. I think the way to go will be to finally draw a line in the sand. Come up with a new recommendation and rebuild it for the way that the web is being used now. Piggy back it on with the change to IPv6 tie it in with authentication and identity and rethink the way webpages are rendered so that it works more like PDF and less like HTML.