Re: Suggestion for generic CSS vendor prefix

* is definitively not a solution since it is outside the
scope of valid chars for an identifier. Double hyphen 
would be possible, but not "beautiful" to see. 

But I agree with you on the concept !


From: Xavier Mouton-Dubosc 
Sent: Sunday, March 21, 2010 11:22 PM
To: www-style@w3.org 
Subject: Suggestion for generic CSS vendor prefix


I wrote this by recommendation from Daniel Glazman. I hope you will excuse my French : this is the first time I do this kind of contribution.

Problem :

Lot of properties are still in the infancy of the validation, other ones are waiting for the definitive approval of the CSS standard 2.1 or 3. So if you want to use an experimental property, each declaration should have the vendor prefix, with all the problems :

-moz-box-shadow: #f00 0 0px 2px;
-webkit-box-shadow: #f00 0 0px 2px;Here, you can see that I completely forgot browsers like MSIE, Opera or Konqueror. A more complete example would be :

-moz-box-shadow: #f00 0 0px 2px;
-webkit-box-shadow: #f00 0 0px 2px;
-opera-box-shadow: #f00 0 0px 2px;
-ms-box-shadow: #f00 0 0px 2px;
-khtml-box-shadow: #f00 0 0px 2px;
But if I wish to write my own browser and implement those properties, my browser will always be forgotten wy CSS writers.
The other problems is the bloating of the CSS for every declaration, and stability in the future.

Proposal :

Using a wildcard like a star to explain that the experimental property is common to every browser that can understand it :

-*-box-shadow: #f00 0 0px 2px;
If the star is a problem to parse, another suggestion is to prefix with two hyphens, a little bit like an unix parameter :

--box-shadow: #f00 0 0px 2px;
Main advantage is browser neutrality, simplicity in the CSS and portability. And we can still target a kind of browser by its vendor-prefix.

Thank you for reading me.

A more complete page in French is on my blog : http://dascritch.net/blog.php/post/2010/03/22/Proprietes-en-tests-et-prefixes-de-vendeurs 
-- 

 
Xavier Mouton-Dubosc
Développeur web freelance








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