We're better than the 90s! The cutting-edge-features-that-only-work-in-some-browsers today aren't proprietary (à la ActiveX) and will eventually make it into every browser.

I read an article a while back (anyone have a link?) that argued that "best viewed with" helped push browsers and the web forward tremendously. IE 9 is evidence that it's happening again.

HTML5 could really use feature publication — if authors could easily detect support for next-generation features (`if(!document.support.canvas){ tellUserAboutNewBrowsers(); }`), they might be less likely to lock out browsers by name.

You mean like http://diveintohtml5.org/detect.html ?

Yes, and I love you for it!

Guides like yours (and Modernizr) are a case for browsers to make feature detection available through a Modernizr-like API.

We're having to get very, very creative to detect support for some features (e.g. writing data to an <input> and seeing if it sticks — it took a while before someone, Mike Taylor, iirc, figured that one out), and we're trusting that every new feature will be indirectly, accidentally detectable.

I'd much rather there was a standard way for a browser to say, "yep, I support this".

Well in defense of that. There are several sites out there that only work google chrome.

Granted, most of them are just "look what can be done with awesome javascript" but still :/