5 ms·

My complaint is not that -webkit CSS extensions are bad. I love how fast the browsers move. It's that people aren't careful to make sure they use all the prefix

by potch 15y ago

My complaint is not that -webkit CSS extensions are bad. I love how fast the browsers move. It's that people aren't careful to make sure they use all the prefixes when they're available. It's an education problem, but people using CSS preprocessors such as LESS and SASS have no real excuse.

tjogin 15y ago
That wouldn't be a problem if the non-vendored variants of the CSS attributes didn't take so god damn long to become proper standards. The problem is not the webkit vendor attributes, the problem is that proper standards aren't able to keep up. HTML5 is still not a proper W3C standard (or "recommendation"), it's still just a working draft, and was last updated in May of 2011. It's been six years. So far.
- potch 15y ago
  100% agreed. The process has to move faster.
- voyou 15y ago
  I don't really understand this objection. Sure, HTML 5 isn't officially a standard, but neither is -webkit-whatever; in both cases, you can use whichever non-standard you like, subject to browser support. The advantage of the W3C draft is that it is a non-standard that the browser makers are all working towards.
  - tjogin 15y ago
    The objection is that the standardization process is too slow. Not a little bit too slow, but so glacially slow it's almost indistinguishable from abandonment. So, progress of key web technologies needs to be put into vendors's hands. CSS border-radius is still not a W3C recommendation. It's been a draft for nine and a half years. So far. It was last updated one year ago. With a standardization process that broken, vendors need to take things into their own hands, and them doing so, especially webkit doing so, has been an astounding success, IMHO.
    - voyou 15y ago
      Yes, but why does it matter that the standardization process is slow? What is the practical relevance of something moving from "Candidate Recommendation" to "Recommendation" status? Why are draft standards any worse than vendor extensions?
      - tjogin 15y ago
        Prefixed attributes bring features to developers while they are still experimental, which means we don't have to wait a decade before trying them out.
- Hixie 15y ago
  HTML is a living standard and was last updated yesterday: http://whatwg.org/html The W3C Recommendation process is obsolete.
toddheasley 15y ago
This is something that the discussion hasnt touched yet, but I don't know that you can assume that devs are omitting the vendor-specific prefixed border radius out of laziness. I'm frequently guilty of coding base lowest-common-denominator CSS, then enhancing the WebKit experience -- not because I'm not aware of the vendor-specific attributes for other rendering engines or because I'm too lazy to type them out, but because only the WebKit rendering is satisfactory. I'm not entirely certain about this approach though, so what is the real harm in a web where boxes have slightly rounded corners in one browser and not another? I'm also curious if anybody has examples of WebKit-only sites (that don't actually function in other browsers) that don't fall under the heading of "look at this cool new CSS thing that this site exists to demonstrate."
- mbrubeck 15y ago
  Here are some examples. I have a lot more. It's hard to develop a new browser when everyone has a "must have" site that serves degraded or broken markup to everything except WebKit. Google Maps in WebKit: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2128410/maps-webkit.png http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2128410/maps-webkit.png Google Maps in Firefox: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2128410/maps-firefox.png http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2128410/maps-firefox.png Gmail in WebKit: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2128410/gmail-webkit.png http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2128410/gmail-webkit.png Gmail in Firefox spoofing a WebKit UA header: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2128410/gmail-firefox-webkit-ua.png http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2128410/gmail-firefox-webkit-ua.png Gmail in Opera or Firefox normally: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2128410/gmail-opera.png http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2128410/gmail-opera.png Twitter in WebKit: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2128410/twitter-webkit.png http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2128410/twitter-webkit.png Twitter in Firefox: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2128410/twitter-firefox.png http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2128410/twitter-firefox.png These are just some of the big-name sites that I knew off-hand. At least these high-budget sites usually have some sort of fallback. Some sites just have degraded styles; some have parts that are unreadable. Some provide partial functionality to non-WebKit browsers; others won't work at all (like Bing web search in Opera). This is becoming more common on the desktop too, with sites like Tweetdeck that just lock out non-WebKit browsers using UA sniffing: https://web.tweetdeck.com/web/unsupported.html https://web.tweetdeck.com/web/unsupported.html

by potch 15y ago

tjogin 15y ago

That wouldn't be a problem if the non-vendored variants of the CSS attributes didn't take so god damn long to become proper standards. The problem is not the webkit vendor attributes, the problem is that proper standards aren't able to keep up. HTML5 is still not a proper W3C standard (or "recommendation"), it's still just a working draft, and was last updated in May of 2011. It's been six years. So far.

potch 15y ago
100% agreed. The process has to move faster.
voyou 15y ago
I don't really understand this objection. Sure, HTML 5 isn't officially a standard, but neither is -webkit-whatever; in both cases, you can use whichever non-standard you like, subject to browser support. The advantage of the W3C draft is that it is a non-standard that the browser makers are all working towards.
- tjogin 15y ago
  The objection is that the standardization process is too slow. Not a little bit too slow, but so glacially slow it's almost indistinguishable from abandonment. So, progress of key web technologies needs to be put into vendors's hands. CSS border-radius is still not a W3C recommendation. It's been a draft for nine and a half years. So far. It was last updated one year ago. With a standardization process that broken, vendors need to take things into their own hands, and them doing so, especially webkit doing so, has been an astounding success, IMHO.
  - voyou 15y ago
    Yes, but why does it matter that the standardization process is slow? What is the practical relevance of something moving from "Candidate Recommendation" to "Recommendation" status? Why are draft standards any worse than vendor extensions?
    - tjogin 15y ago
      Prefixed attributes bring features to developers while they are still experimental, which means we don't have to wait a decade before trying them out.
Hixie 15y ago
HTML is a living standard and was last updated yesterday: http://whatwg.org/html The W3C Recommendation process is obsolete.

toddheasley 15y ago

This is something that the discussion hasnt touched yet, but I don't know that you can assume that devs are omitting the vendor-specific prefixed border radius out of laziness. I'm frequently guilty of coding base lowest-common-denominator CSS, then enhancing the WebKit experience -- not because I'm not aware of the vendor-specific attributes for other rendering engines or because I'm too lazy to type them out, but because only the WebKit rendering is satisfactory. I'm not entirely certain about this approach though, so what is the real harm in a web where boxes have slightly rounded corners in one browser and not another? I'm also curious if anybody has examples of WebKit-only sites (that don't actually function in other browsers) that don't fall under the heading of "look at this cool new CSS thing that this site exists to demonstrate."

mbrubeck 15y ago
Here are some examples. I have a lot more. It's hard to develop a new browser when everyone has a "must have" site that serves degraded or broken markup to everything except WebKit. Google Maps in WebKit: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2128410/maps-webkit.png http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2128410/maps-webkit.png Google Maps in Firefox: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2128410/maps-firefox.png http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2128410/maps-firefox.png Gmail in WebKit: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2128410/gmail-webkit.png http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2128410/gmail-webkit.png Gmail in Firefox spoofing a WebKit UA header: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2128410/gmail-firefox-webkit-ua.png http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2128410/gmail-firefox-webkit-ua.png Gmail in Opera or Firefox normally: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2128410/gmail-opera.png http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2128410/gmail-opera.png Twitter in WebKit: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2128410/twitter-webkit.png http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2128410/twitter-webkit.png Twitter in Firefox: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2128410/twitter-firefox.png http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2128410/twitter-firefox.png These are just some of the big-name sites that I knew off-hand. At least these high-budget sites usually have some sort of fallback. Some sites just have degraded styles; some have parts that are unreadable. Some provide partial functionality to non-WebKit browsers; others won't work at all (like Bing web search in Opera). This is becoming more common on the desktop too, with sites like Tweetdeck that just lock out non-WebKit browsers using UA sniffing: https://web.tweetdeck.com/web/unsupported.html https://web.tweetdeck.com/web/unsupported.html