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

On May 17, 2011, at 8:08 PM, Eric A. Meyer wrote:

> 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",

I'm saying we would need a pretty darn good reason to change it even now. And I don't think we have one. Sure, things change while the thing is indexed, but the changes usually don't make the thing act in the opposite manner to the way it did in a major recent release of the second-most-used browser. For the site I work on, I would end up needing to remove -moz-linear-gradient from wherever I have it, and wait until most of my audience was no longer using Firefox 4 anymore before I employed it again. Once it reached CR and the prefix is removed, then I could once again have linear-gradient do something in Firefox, but only those with the latest version (Firefox 4.1?) would then see it. The overall effect would be less author experience using the prefixed version (assuming other authors, like me, did not want their gradients upside-down or turned sideways in major releases of major browsers). As to -webkit-linear-gradient, I don't think it is in any releases of Safari other than nightly downloads (I could be wrong), but apparently Chrome 10 does, so it wouldn't be safe to use that prefixed version either (until most people had replaced Chrome 10 with Chrome 11 or whatever). This path is pure folly, IMO.

Received on Wednesday, 18 May 2011 04:42:46 UTC