abanana

From a quick look at the second horizontal strip that starts "what is this?", and without wasting time doing too much digging, it appears to be ultimately caused by using a grid layout for a heading followed by a few paragraphs, all of which fill the available (constrained) width, which amounts to one of the absolute simplest layouts possible in CSS - block. Last time I saw something similar, albeit with flexbox not grid, it was from a junior developer who appeared to have only learned flexbox and nothing else.

As a quick semi-fix, just disabling grid-template-columns on .base-layout is enough to fix almost everything except the constrained width.

And yes, it makes sense to use one particular old browser as a general proxy for older browsers in general, so people shouldn't get hung up on the particular version of Safari you happened to mention.

Perhaps, if you're not using a sidebar for bookmarks or vertical tabs or whatever, it suggests something ought to have changed in UI design back when widescreen monitors became the norm?

I've seen similar before - people not understanding that certain things are at their most successful if they're unobtrusive.

It does sound like the counter-stance is mainly also the view of one person, Dr Miles Russell at Bournemouth Uni. But from bits I've read before, Sir Mortimer Wheeler was from the same era as Sir Arthur Evans, that time when they enjoyed absolute authority and could not be challenged. That meant their mistakes, and even deliberate lies, had to be considered to be 100% known fact and would not be corrected until after their deaths.

Just a correction: Netcafes don't have to get special licences. I'm not aware of any such licences existing anymore. They just buy however many standard retail copies or online accounts they want. Sometimes a publisher will see the marketing value and will provide some copies/licences at no charge.

Going back 15-20 years or so, Valve used to run a "Cybercafe Program" that was a large monthly expense for cybercafes, but shut it down after a while because it wasn't worth the cost of administration. Now cybercafes buy Steam accounts same as any end user. Asking any publisher for a cybercafe or "commercial exploitation" licence always invoked the response "Um - no idea?" from any department you asked, coupled with "We're afraid to suggest anything" from the legal department and "just use standard copies I suppose?" from the marketing department.

While a lot of devs love to use brand-new stuff that's only just been added to some browsers, some of us are not willing when we know it won't work for (almost) all users. The scroll() function is too new for use in production, IMO (but good to know it exists, to revisit after a while). If I have to code something else anyway, or copy-and-paste a polyfill, then why not just use a more robust option in the first place.

The stuff around SimCity in this article is poorly written. It seems the author has misunderstood it to have been a one-off special case. I looked back at Joel Spolsky's article, and he does make it quite clear that the SimCity example was just one of many: "it still ran old 16 bit software perfectly. Microsoft obsessed about this, spending a big chunk of change testing every old program they could find with Windows 95".

The article does later mention "Windows XP’s hidden database of app fixes" but doesn't appreciate that the concept really started with Windows 95, and in a big way, not "just to cover up one game’s bug".