Re: The perils of prefixing... or rather trying to unprefix

On 11/6/12 5:22 AM, Sebastian Zartner wrote:
> Just because some JS library developers are not fast enough catching up
> with unprefixing things in Gecko is not a reason to avoid prefixing.

No, you don't understand.

There should be no "catching up" involved.  Gecko currently supports 
both "transform" and "-moz-transform".  But these libraries _still_ break.

Furthermore, they will likewise break for anyone else who implements a 
property called "transform".

And as a result, users can't use websites.  Web developers are trying to 
author sites, and those don't work.  This is not a theoretical harm here.

> Introducing new / experimental things without prefixing them will cause
> much more problems in the future in case their sytnax / logic changes.

If their syntax changes there is no problem.

Note that I'm not suggesting we blindly ship unprefixed stuff.  For 
example, we're shipping unprefixed @supports right now, but there is no 
problem, because it's not enabled by default.  This is likely to be the 
model Gecko follows from now.

> Instead people should be better prepared for what's coming next

Yes, and we should all have puppies and Unicorns.

> and support for the prefixed properties should be kept for one or two engine
> versions

You clearly didn't read my original mail.  Please do go do that now. 
I'll wait.

> before they are completely dropped to give people time to adapt
> their code.

No one dropped anything.

-Boris

Received on Tuesday, 6 November 2012 15:53:59 UTC