Steps to unprefixing CSS Transforms, was: Re: "-draftX-" prefix

On 12/5/11 4:08 PM, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
> Gradients would not have been helped by moving faster, because they
> changed based on author feedback and internal design reviews.  As I
> said, we forged new ground with it, and that took more time than it
> "should" have if we'd already known what we do now.  On the other
> hand, Transitions/Animations/Transforms are only not in CR because the
> editors haven't been working on them - moving faster*would*  have
> helped with them.  I've been poking at Flexbox for some time, but I
> didn't actually start rewriting it until March of this year, only 9
> months ago.  I think it's advancing at a reasonable pace; it would go
> slightly faster if I weren't also focusing on Images and Lists and
> several other things, but not significantly so.

There are still instabilities and incompatibilities between the vendors 
on CSS Transforms. I think that more time needs to pass with Web 
Components before it's figured out. There has been significant push-back 
from Mozilla about zoom-related interfaces. As a consequence, the 
behavior of form elements, such as <input> and <canvas> are up in the air.

I'm confident the issues will re-appear in some form with Web 
Components, as that effort examines the inner-workings of interactive 
elements and their relationship to DOM+CSS.

By push-back, I'm referring to: style.zoom, window.screen pixelRatio 
values, and css transform hit testing on input elements.

There are also issues with the behavior of CSS transforms and <object> 
elements, such as when using Flash. Given how contentions <canvas> and 
<input> have been, I don't expect <object> behavior to be easily unified.

CSS transforms have not reached consensus amongst vendors. They may like 
the spec, but they have not agreed on implementation of it.


-Charles