Re: Possible Vendor Prefix Solution

There's a discrepancy between how vendor prefixed properties were intended
to be used, and how they're actually used. Is that not what we're trying to
fix? The problems I'm trying to solve right now are:

* Vendor prefixes are very verbose, and completely unnecessary when the
syntax between a particular draft property is identical between vendors.
* As a consequence of the former, developers don't always included the
non-prefixed property, and don't always account for all vendor prefixes.

> If the Web were full of unprefixed uses of the properties,
implementations would have to maintain compatibility with the syntax and
behavior.

I don't see how this is any different to the current situation. Vendor
prefixed properties are used on many production websites. Any change to
those properties has the potential to break those websites. My suggestion
does not introduce any new problems, nor does it come with any side-effects
that vendor-prefixes (or draft properties in general) don't already possess.

If using draft properties, prefixed or not, on a production website, you
must be vigilante in ensuring those properties you're using remain
compatible. This is the current situation, and would remain the same under
my proposal.

Given that, can anyone provide a reason not to adopt my proposal?

Cheers,
Tom

On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 2:49 AM, L. David Baron <dbaron@dbaron.org> wrote:

> On Monday 2013-03-04 20:56 +1000, Tom Wardrop wrote:
> > The solution I propose is to keep vendor prefixes as they are, but to
> > encourage browser vendors to implement draft properties using the
> standard
> > property name as well. To use Firefox as my example browser, Firefox
> should
> > support both -moz-box-sizing and box-sizing. One should simply be an
> alias
> > of the other.
>
> This doesn't solve the problem that vendor prefixes were originally
> designed to solve, which is that the draft status of the properties
> is such that the group is not yet ready to commit to being backwards
> compatible with content using those properties.  If the Web were
> full of unprefixed uses of the properties, implementations would
> have to maintain compatibility with the syntax and behavior.
>
> -David
>
> --
> 𝄞   L. David Baron                         http://dbaron.org/   𝄂
> 𝄢   Mozilla                           http://www.mozilla.org/   𝄂
>