RE: CSS Variables

[Boris Zbarsky:]
> The idea is to not put the experimental features out to a wide testing
> audience, thus limiting their use to experimental, non-production
> situations (because they will only work in browsers used by a few hundred
> thousand people at the most).
> 
> This setup gives authors a chance to try the feature out and report
> feedback without having to deal with pages that actually depend on the
> feature.

So what I am missing is that these do not make it into public releases, 
Betas and other bits generally downloaded by large populations so that 
web authors cannot rely on them in their pages ?

In the case of IE, Previews are actually downloaded by large samples
but I'd assume they qualify since they have no chrome and really
targeted at developers. What would be the vehicle for Firefox ? 

I'm still not quite sure I like the idea of releasing experimental features
completely unmarked as such - i.e. they look, smell and act like 'real' 
features - and then pull them out later. I would suggest some kind of 
explicit opt-in in the stylesheet letting the author declare 'yes, turn
on the experimental stuff for browser X'. At a minimum it'd help spot the 
problem when such pages make it to the public web and someone reports a bug 
against them (you can count on that happening).

Received on Wednesday, 9 February 2011 17:37:40 UTC