RE: A List Apart: Articles: Prefix or Posthack

> From: www-style-request@w3.org [mailto:www-style-request@w3.org] On
> Behalf Of Eric A. Meyer


>     I don't understand the distinction you're drawing, but maybe
> because I come at it from a different direction.  Once a spec hits CR
> or is even ready to hit CR, at which point bare properties can be
> supported in conforming implementations, there shouldn't be any more
> changes to behavior.  That's what I'm trying to accomplish here.

Not to confuse things further but specs can go in and out of CR with
implementations shipping in between those transitions. Box-shadow, for
instance, came back into Backgrounds & Borders after the spec hit CR. 
By which time one vendor - Opera - had implemented some of the spec's 
Properties without a prefix. Your expectations imply we may want to 
CR features i.e. we CR border images even though we're still working on
the box-shadow part of the spec; the WG discussed that recently and agreed 
it may be desirable in the future. Do you agree ?

Opera's first CSS3 Backgrounds & Borders implementation also brings up 
another practice that is imo harmful to authors: partial 'bare' feature 
implementation e.g. supporting the longhand property but not the shorthand 
or vice-versa. I don't think authors should be forced to use a shorthand for, 
say, border-image because one vendor decided they'd ship with only the shorthand
for now and implement the longhand properties later. If you want to implement
bare border-image, you have to support the full property set. If you can't support
the full feature, you have to keep it prefixed. 

It should be, however, OK for a browser vendor to only implement one of the module's
features in a given release i.e. only border image.

Received on Friday, 9 July 2010 20:31:54 UTC