Re: Procedural (non-technical) point about freezing the cat and hat combinators before they've even been defined (was Re: Shadow DOM: Hat and Cat -- if that's your real name.)

On Tue, Feb 04, 2014 at 06:22:33PM -0800, Edward O'Connor wrote:

> In the CSS WG we've historically allowed implementations to ship
> unprefixed properties when the spec containing those properties hits CR.
> Selector combinators are a funny case—they can't be prefixed—so we
> should be extra careful about shipping them prematurely.
> 
> But as far as I can tell, these combinators *aren't even [in a spec that's
> visible enough to receive wider discussion]*, much less in a spec that's hit
> (or will soon hit) CR. This seems highly irregular.

Just to state explicitly in this thread the idea that no doubt many people have
had in mind:

One way out of this is to ship it prefixed, as in ^-webkit-cat or /-moz-hat
or whatever other <combinator-prefix> you fancy from the "Pseudo-elements
vs. combinators" thread.  This doesn't even commit CSS to a particular choice
of <combinator-prefix> (to the extent that any prefixed feature can be
retracted), because the shipped choice would only ever be used in conjunction
with a vendor prefix.

(Whether such an approach is useful depends in part on whether a prefixed
 implementation is a sufficient response to the importance of pushing forward
 quickly that Google perceives.)

pjrm.