Why Device Independence Matters

I still remember the first time I felt truly misled by the software I had written. It was sometime in the early 2000s, during what we now call the AJAX era, a period roughly between 2004 and 2008 when Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) made it possible for web pages to fetch data and update their content without a full page reload when Web 2.0 (the shift from static, read-only web pages to interactive, user-generated-content platforms) was more of an aspiration than a movement. Internet Explorer dominated the market, Firefox was still new, and Facebook didn’t yet exist. I had built what I thought was a clean, interactive web interface. It worked beautifully in Firefox. But when I opened it in Internet Explorer, everything fell apart. Layouts shifted, buttons failed to respond, and event handling broke in subtle and confusing ways.