>> Why push the complexity onto the user? Someone who just wants to make a working website doesn't care about your pedantry.
Because this approach has historically resulted in people who "just wanted to make a working website" making websites that only work in specific browsers (or worse yet, specific versions of specific browsers on specific platforms). And then those sites stuck around and infrastructure got built around them that made them hard to fix.
We've spent the best part of 00s fixing that mess, and there are still some pockets that haven't been properly cleaned up. If that's not a lesson to learn from, I don't know what is.
Because this approach has historically resulted in people who "just wanted to make a working website" making websites that only work in specific browsers (or worse yet, specific versions of specific browsers on specific platforms). And then those sites stuck around and infrastructure got built around them that made them hard to fix.
We've spent the best part of 00s fixing that mess, and there are still some pockets that haven't been properly cleaned up. If that's not a lesson to learn from, I don't know what is.