Re: A List Apart: Articles: Prefix or Posthack

On Thursday 2010-07-08 22:41 -0400, Eric A. Meyer wrote:
> At 6:34 PM -0700 7/8/10, Boris Zbarsky wrote:
> 
> >What makes you think it costs little?
> 
>    I know you're asking Richard, but I'll step in and ask why it
> costs more than a little to do, in effect, this:
> 
>    if (property == '-moz-box-shadow' || property == 'box-shadow') boxShadow();
> 
> As it is, your choice to drop prefixed-property support is hostile
> to authors, and I'm having extreme difficulty understanding why you
> think it's a good idea to take that path.

As much as possible, we want to avoid authors putting Gecko-specific
content on the Web.  Authors who are using -moz-box-shadow should
also be using box-shadow; if they're not, they're writing
Gecko-specific CSS (and perhaps some additional WebKit-specific CSS,
etc., alongside it, which is still hostile to any new entrants in
the browser space along with any omitted existing browsers).

So we have a choice between:
1. supporting the -moz- prefix permanently
2. supporting both for one release cycle to give authors a transition
   period
3. dropping the prefix immediately

I have trouble seeing any advantages of (2) over (3), since if we
wait longer to drop support for the prefixed version, there will
only be *more* content written using the prefix.

I really don't want to do (1), since it means that authors will
permanently be able to write Gecko-specific CSS without ever seeing
that it's a problem.

-David

-- 
L. David Baron                                 http://dbaron.org/
Mozilla Corporation                       http://www.mozilla.com/

Received on Friday, 9 July 2010 04:02:50 UTC