@Marco I am sure some developers at Microsoft also said the same about staying compatible with older versions of Office, the same developers from Playstation about supporting PS3 games in PS4... "Let's make our life easier! Who cares about supporting legacy stuff!". Things that users hate and only suffer because they don't have much say about it.
Its a fundamental question as we use digital for more and more things in our lives : do we want our digital products to only have a 3 to 5 year-life span? Imagine tomorrow if a new version of JPEG came and none of your previous photos could be read? Sorry Facebook doesn't support this old thing called JPEG please upload everything again in JPEG2000 :) Not everyone lives in a 'rich' country and has access to computers that would support the latest 2 versions of major browsers.* XP doesn't support IE 10* and *XP is still* *25.27% of OS marketshare worldwide*! It's going to take 3 years at least for that to start fading to an insignificant amount. We work with professional and amateur football clubs: a lot of them are associations. They don't do it for the money. A lot of these associations got computers donated to them from companies; Computers that are 4 or 5 years old but still working fine. And guess what they run typically: XP. I am happy when at least they don't have IE6! Twitter was knows better: it recently is started supporting Gif! Yes Gif this old and crappy format! Talk about old stuff! But for performance purpose Twitter converts seemlessly for users Gifs into H264 videos. That's a much better user-friendly approach. I think it's a bad long term calculation. You should also have some *respect for your users*. Not everyone is a geek who cares or thinks about updating his browser and what not. But if anything, when a user goes to a website if it uses new standards it should not just break the website and expect the user to figure out that the reason the wbeiste is broken is because his browser doesn't support "web components" or what not. It should tell him "Please update your browser to get the full experience" or "Sorry you need to update you browser to visit this website" and offer links to all browser vendors so it's one click away from being a problem solved. (You'd be surprised how many people will download by mistake a version of a browser filled with useless toolbars, spamware and what not from a third party download website.) Here is a the reality check of what people know about Browsers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ I think standards have more chance evolving at a fast pace when they also address the previous standards instead of just ignoring the past. It might be fine to get a project going but if Polymer wants to become used for mainstream websites within 3 years it will have to address older browser compatibility gracefully -- in my humble opinion. Follow Polymer on Google+: plus.google.com/107187849809354688692 --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Polymer" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/polymer-dev/6a905cd2-caea-4661-94ba-bb1675138155%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
