Re: Selectors, vendor prefixes (again...) and IE9 and Opera and WebKit

On 5/14/10 12:04 PM, François REMY wrote:
> If it's true, I may reconsider the whole point. But
> small tests I performed seemed to show that the
> implementation were reliable enough for simple
> uses-cases, at least.

Like I said, that's almost always going to be the case.  If we held 
things to only that standard of quality before removing prefixes, we'd 
be in a world of hurt.

The ::selection case is, of course, different because it was in CR for a 
while (though how something so totally underspecified ended up in CR, 
and how things like that are still landing in CR now is a mystery to me).

> Well, it's not the point I'm defending here. The point is that :
> (a) The syntax of ::selection is not likely to change

The syntax is nonexistent, really.  It's just a pseudo-element.  It has 
the same "syntax" as ::before or ::first-line.  The processing model is 
what's important, and that's not only likely to change, it's completely 
undefined as far as I can tell.

> (b) It's currently already possible to define a "minimal set"
> of things every UA support, and which covers a great part
> of the uses-cases we found for the property

As long as you're very very careful in your use, perhaps.

> (c) Websites are already using the feature

Honestly, I use a browser which doesn't support this feature on a daily 
basis and I have never encountered a problem with a website due to lack 
of support for this feature.  That suggests to me that removing support 
is not going to "break the web" if it comes to that.

> This mean the feature is mature enough to *allow* the UAs that
> feels the feature is stable and interoperable enough in their
> browser to accept the unprefixed version of the selector.

I don't think it's mature enough, in fact.  If it were not for its 
history of being in CR at some point I would be completely opposed to 
putting it into a CR-level draft now, in the state it's in.

For example, as soon as you have more than one ::selection selector in 
your stylesheet the behavior is undefined and blows up in your face.

Heck, something as simple as:

   div::selection { color: green; }

gives different behavior in Opera and Webkit.

> Well, I'm not asking why you would like to have ::selection
> not recognized by UA's. I'm speaking about "why would you
> like that the (final) version of the selector has another name
> than ::selection ?".

I wouldn't.  Where did I say that I would?

> Well it's not what I want to. Unprefixed version should only
> be accepted when the property is stable enough to be used
> (at least for the most part) on the web.

Doesn't look to me that ::selection is there, in my 5 minutes of testing.

-Boris

Received on Friday, 14 May 2010 16:16:24 UTC