W3C co-chair: Apple, Google power causing Open Web crisis →
At least, that’s the way CNET’s Stephen Shankland reports it:
The problem right now, [the W3C’s Daniel] Glazman said, is that programmers use -webkit prefixed features without including -o for Opera, -ms for Microsoft IE, or -moz for Mozilla’s Firefox. That happens even when those other browsers support the CSS features in question. “I am asking all the Web authors community to stop designing web sites for WebKit only, in particular when adding support for other browsers is only a matter of adding a few extra prefixed CSS properties,” Glazman said.
What Glazman is talking about here, essentially, is that there are a bunch of “newer” CSS properties which are part of the CSS3 standard which browser manufacturers all started to implement with vendor-specific prefixes: the -o and -moz and -webkit mentioned above. Instead of writing “border-radius: 5px” to get rounded borders, you had to write “-webkit-border-radius: 5px”. And repeat that exact same line with every vendor prefix, plus the line without the prefix for good measure.
Shankland compares this to Microsoft’s position with IE, when “programmers would write pages that looked good in it regardless of whether they followed standards or not.” It’s an understandable comparison on a surface level, but I’d argue the bigger problem here is: the W3C working group. The first CSS3 drafts were published in June 1999. While parts of what they’re working on—the advanced layout syntax, for instance—is pretty complex, it should not take twelve years to agree on “border-radius:
Glazman is right that web developers shouldn’t be targeting WebKit only by just using the WebKit CSS3 prefixes and ignoring the others, but the majority of CSS3 that’s in use on the web right now is not in the “wildly experimental weird shit” category, and as web developers we shouldn’t be having to write 4–5 nearly identical lines repeatedly to do bog-simple effects. The right solution isn’t for Mozilla and Opera to adopt the -webkit prefix—it’s for the W3C to stop “recommending” that browsers make web developers treat things that all the current major browsers do identically as experimental.
