Re: A List Apart: Articles: Prefix or Posthack

On 7/9/10 6:50 AM, Eric A. Meyer wrote:
> Well, that shouldn't happen either, at least in the ideal case (from my
> point of view). As I have understood it, and as I think most authors
> who've done any work with prefixes have understood it, prefixed
> properties are 'in progress' and may change.

That's how Gecko treats it, yes.  That's not how Webkit and IE have been 
treating it.  Not sure about Opera.

> I do not have the sense that people think that prefixed properties will
> just cease to be supported. If that becomes the default, even for one
> major browser family like Gecko

It's been the default for Gecko for years now, no?  I mean... we dropped 
-moz-opacity when we shipped Firefox 3.5 (support was gone on trunk in 
fall 2008 and in the release in June 2009).  We'd dropped other things 
before that without adding an alias, iirc.

> then there will be a lot more reluctance to use vendor prefixes.

Why?

>> your example above:
>>
>> -moz-box-shadow: ...;
>> box-shadow: ...;
>>
>> as far as I can tell. Am I missing something?
>
> Actually, no, that's fine. But there may be cases where the unprefixed
> property is not listed

Why not?  And as David said, aren't those exactly the cases we want to 
discourage?

> Plus there's the point I mentioned above about authorial expectations.

I really wonder why people have these expectations that have no bearing 
on reality, at least not if you're paying attention for the last 2-3 
years...

> Perhaps the solution is a major push to change expectations, but my
> concern is that even that will push many people away from experimenting
> (because "they're just going to kill this later") and thus rob us of
> much-needed eyeballs.

I agree that this is a valid concern, but we should be encouraging 
people to use the unprefixed property at the end if the have this 
concern.  Of course then if the spec changes they'll have to change 
their unprefixed usage... but they have to change their prefixed usage 
too, in that case.  For Gecko, that is.

-Boris

Received on Friday, 9 July 2010 15:32:52 UTC