Re: Purpose of ring 0 and vendor prefixes (was: Re: Ringmark is now open source)

On 5/3/12 10:42 AM, "James Graham" <jgraham@opera.com> wrote:

>On 05/03/2012 10:19 AM, Tobie Langel wrote:
>
>> Isn't the vendor-prefix conversation already happening in the CSS WG? If
>> so, I suggest we just wait for the output of that group and apply it to
>> the CG (and its test suites).
>
>I disagree. Irrespective of the decisions of the CSS WG, the goal of
>this work should be a set of aspirational documents encouraging rapid
>implementation of the most desired features across browsers so that
>developers to depend on them as soon as possible. Prefixes have the
>opposite effect; they make it hard for developers to do the right thing,
>easy for specs to get lost in committee, and encourage market
>fragmentation. We should be working as hard as we can to *dis*courage
>prefixed implementations in long-lived products and instead encourage
>rapid convergence on the final prefix-free forms of new features.

>From your comment and others, It sounds like there's strong interest
produce a Note about the various issues surrounding vendor prefixes,
notably:

- vendor prefix lifecycle,
- what to do when prefix usage goes wrong (the -webkit saga),
- steps to avoid prefix usage going wrong again in the future,
- information about prefixes for devs (when and how to use them, if at
all?),
- vendor prefixes outside of CSS.

James, would you be willing to do a first pass?

I'd also really like to see some input from web developers on this subject
so as to have as balanced a perspective as possible.

Thanks,

--tobie

Received on Thursday, 3 May 2012 14:06:45 UTC