Re: CSS Variables

On Wed, Feb 9, 2011 at 9:37 AM, Sylvain Galineau <sylvaing@microsoft.com>wrote:

> [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'.


The explicit opt-in is the Dev channel restriction, but we've considered
something like an "about:flags" toggle until things are more broadly agreed.
In either case, no developer is going to be able to target
a sizable population of users with these experimental features so long as
the dev-channel restriction is in place, meaning the fear of it "leaking
out" into the public web isn't really a problem.


> 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).