- From: Florian Rivoal <florian@rivoal.net>
- Date: Wed, 27 May 2015 23:02:05 +0200
- To: Richard Ishida <ishida@w3.org>
- Cc: Koji Ishii <kojiishi@gmail.com>, "Phillips, Addison" <addison@lab126.com>, "cowan@ccil.org" <cowan@ccil.org>, "Elizabeth J. Pyatt" <ejp10@psu.edu>, www International <www-international@w3.org>
> On 27 May 2015, at 18:34, Richard Ishida <ishida@w3.org> wrote: > > On 27/05/2015 10:09, Koji Ishii wrote: >> Thank you for the great article, Richard. >> >> A couple of comments: >> >> 1. It’s probably better to put unprefixed property at the end. > > yep, done. Actually, I'd rather you didn't. This is a lost battle on most properties given how often this is done, but this approach has problematic consequences, and unprefixed writing-mode usage so far might still be sufficiently rare that we're not yet stuck. TL;DR: If too many authors follow this advice, it may get in the way of desirable spec improvements and fixes. Full version: Browsers don't support the propoerties unprefixed because while the spec is fairly stable, it's not stable enough yet to be considered final, and we may still want to change things. By writing the unprefixed variant as well, desipite the lack of existance of unprefixed implementation, you are making the bet that there will be no change between now and final implementations, and that whenever they come around, final implementations will interpret your unprefixed code the same way as they now interpret you prefixed code. But it is precisely because we're not sure that this will be the case that prefixes exist in the first place, and for writing modes we have actually discussed potentially breaking changes at the last F2F. If enough people use the unprefixed properties before unprefixed implementations exist, to avoid breaking existing content browser vendors may be prevented to make a behavior change that would otherwise be desirable, defeating the point of having prefixes. Had content predating the desirable spec change only used prefixed properties, the browser vendors could have kept their existing behavior for the prefixed version, while implementing the new and better behavior for the unprefixed implementation. This "best practice" problematic enough that nowadays most browsers, instead of shipping work-in-progress features under a prefix like they used to, actually don't ship them at all in production builds until the spec is final. - Florian
Received on Wednesday, 27 May 2015 21:02:30 UTC