Hallvord Steen, a site compatibility expert for the Opera browser, uses an ice skating metaphor to describe the relationship between sites and browsers, with the example of Blogger’s recent, shall we say, “miscommunication” with Opera that caused all post bodies from that browser to be dropped. (By this I mean, it was their bug, but our wacky code that exposed it. And props to Hallvord for proposing the workaround.)
I feel that the elegance inherent in that metaphor is quite out of place, however. The apter analogy is to building a glass skyscraper on a foundation of monkeys who hate each other. And I’m confident that website developers and browser makers have different opinions of which is the skyscraper and which are the monkeys.
