Re: [css3-images] Changing the angles in gradients

At 16:27 -0700 5/17/11, Brad Kemper wrote:

>On May 17, 2011, at 3:33 PM, "Eric A. Meyer" <eric@meyerweb.com> wrote:
>
>>    That's why we have prefixes, as far as I'm concerned-- to let 
>>implementors fix bugs and keep pace with changing specs.
>
>How does that help authors who are already using prefixes for 4 
>browsers, and users who update at different paces? It doesn't. The 
>authors would have to remove all the prefixed gradients, and rely 
>only on the raster images that they had in there as fallbacks.

    Of course it doesn't help them, but we can't save everyone.  As 
I've said in the past, the alternative is that we wait for an 
unprefixed incompatibility to get deadlocked by "we can't change this 
now, we have customers with web sites that we can't break", and 
relive the late 90's all over again.  DOCTYPE switching got us out of 
that mess once.  It is very, very unlikely that it could do so again.
    I don't much like writing four prefixed variants for some things, 
but I've seen what unprefixed (and therefore unchangeable) 
incompatibiities can do.  It was pretty awful, and we still deal with 
echoes of it today, ten years after a desperate maneuver rescued CSS. 
As I result, I already think border-radius was unprefixed too 
quickly.  Take that for whatever you think it's worth.

-- 
Eric A. Meyer (eric@meyerweb.com)     http://meyerweb.com/

Received on Wednesday, 18 May 2011 03:08:38 UTC