After last week’s rant about, among other things, the W3C Device Adaptation spec, one of the spec’s authors asked me to clarify my critique. Fair enough. Here’s my take on the current specification.

My critique of Device Adaptation consists of three main themes:

1. The spec does not address the actual current situation at all, while all browsers actually support my theory of the layout, visual, and ideal viewports decently, and I’ve already done the heavy lifting.
2. The spec is obscure about what its most important components actually mean; I’m especially thinking of the initial and actual viewport. A simple schematic would have helped a lot here, and it’s fairly easy to produce.
3. Although the spec treats relevant media queries as well as the meta viewport and the @viewport syntax, it does not treat the relevant JavaScript properties such as window.innerWidth and devicePixelRatio. That latter, especially, could do with some specification.

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Today I rant about undocumented Chrome features and unreadable W3C specs. There’s too much of both nowadays, and I’m getting VERY tired of both. Google and W3C should clean up their act.

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