Re: vendor prefixes: co-cascading

On Fri, Nov 18, 2011 at 2:32 PM, François REMY
<fremycompany_pub@yahoo.fr> wrote:
> The integration features Microsoft introduced for Windows 7 site-pinning
> will never become a standard because it's a platform-specific feature. The
> same goes for the Apple-pinning icon. Those things are very useful, but they
> simply don't make sense in another context that the one they were made for.

Do you mean the Microsoft meta keywords and the Apple link relations?
Or are there CSS features related to these features, too?

In the case of apple-touch-icon, it is actually used by non-Apple
platforms that want a site icon that has a higher resolution that
traditional favicons. Even though HTML5 specifies how to use
high-resolution icons with rel=icon, more sites already have an
apple-touch-icon.

> The same story goes again for Microsoft Word, which use "special" CSS
> properities to store things that are not representable in CSS today but they
> want to retreive back when the HTML is opened in Word later.

I see. I meant platform-specific features in browsers. (I wouldn't be
too surprised if LibreOffice found it competitively beneficial to
implement Word's vendor-prefixed properties in HTML import.)

> You can find
> similar properties in "Prince", an HTML bookprinter which need ways to
> represent headers and footers in a way the CSS spec doesn't allow at this
> time.

The properties for managing PDF bookmarks in Prince seem specific to
PDF conversion (but even that's not unique to Prince). More generally,
though, the kind of stuff that Prince does could be applicable to
printing functionality in browsers, too, if browsers were investing in
printing more than they are now. That is, I don't think most of
Prince's non-standard stuff should be assumed a priori to be
Prince-specific forever.

In any case, I'm more interested in what browsers do with prefixes. No
offense to Prince, but Prince doesn't have enough effect on how
authors behave on the Web at large for its vendor-specific CSS to
cause the kind of problems that I'm worried about.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Friday, 18 November 2011 13:12:27 UTC