Re: Proposal to enable -css- prefix on transform and appearance

On Feb 23, 2012, at 12:26 , Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 12:02 PM, David Singer <singer@apple.com> wrote:
>> On Feb 23, 2012, at 8:38 , Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
>>> On Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 8:14 PM, Charles Pritchard <chuck@jumis.com> wrote:
>>>> If at all possible, it'd be great to see Mozilla, Opera, Microsoft and
>>>> Gapple pick up  -css- as a cross-vendor prefix:
>>>> 
>>>> I'd like to see -css- supported in the next beta releases:
>>>> 
>>>> The -css-transform family.
>>>> -css-appearance: none (and I think auto, or inherit, or whatever it is).
>>>> 
>>>> It requires only minimal effort on the vendor developers, it's a "vendor"
>>>> prefix, so there are no rules, and we've got good consensus that appearance:
>>>> none is here to stay, and transform will happen eventually.
>>>> 
>>>> Thank you for your consideration,
>>> 
>>> What's the benefit of this?
>> 
>> It was my suggestion for a vendor-neutral pre-release prefix "from by the CSS WG".  I have no strong feelings about whether -css, -draft, or something else is the best.
>> 
>> It would allow vendors to implement, and more, evangelize, and web authors to use, a single prefixed version (quite often) and not have to replicate for every vendor.
> 
> We don't actually want that, as explained in other threads.  Having a
> single shared prefix hurts our ability to experiment and for authors
> to work around interop problems.
> 
> It seems particularly weird to do this for the specs that we're
> attempting to push into unprefixed ASAP.


I'm not sure who 'we' is.  

There are features in development which are not supposed to ship un-prefixed.  As a result, browser vendors implement and evangelize the prefixed version. Some web sites don't author all the prefix variants. This is leading some browsers to want to implement other vendors' prefixes, and I feel that browsers are getting criticized for doing what they're told to do: implement and talk about only prefixed versions until the CSS WG declares stability.

Whether it's the right time for this spec. I don't know.  But the current situation - using vendor prefixes for community features in development - is causing grief.

When vendors *intend* to be implementing the same spec., I think the pressure should be on them to fix their bugs; relieving that pressure by writing vendor-specific rules only alleviates the pressure.

However, one obvious alternative is to have each vendor implement both their prefix and the 'group' prefix,m as suggested above, and evangelize the public 'group' prefix, so web pages can be written using the common definition.

So, stick with the current state of only either vendor-specific prefix or final un-prefixed, if you like, but please then make it clear that vendors own their own prefix, and other vendors should not implement it, and stop criticizing vendors for talking about only their own prefixed version - which is all they can, at that point.


David Singer
Multimedia and Software Standards, Apple Inc.

Received on Thursday, 23 February 2012 21:45:26 UTC