What are “standards” coming to?
Who’s guilty?
Apple and Chrome: They’re supporting vendor prefixed properties like they’re a standard part of development.
Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer: They should have been on the ball more. Need to push their evangelism further. Teach developers that it’s not exclusively -webkit to style elements.
All the browsers: experimental suggests that it will either be discarded or implemented fully at some point. It’s both not clear what’s a real specification be experimentally supported, nor when those experimental prefixes will be dropped.
The working group: for not getting these properties to standards quickly enough. The web moves quickly, and as much as a I appreciate that the standards will not move as quickly, they’re still taking way too long.
Evangelists: We’re too eager to show off experimental effects. They’re cool, right? But it’s cost us, and we should always used vendor prefixes as a backup, not as the final thing.
Developers: We know better. We know/hope that eventually these prefixes will be dropped, but we’re propagating this problem.
You and me: I’m just as guilty as everyone else in using WebKit only prefixes.
Browsers need to:
Non-production ready browsers should support experimental prefixes, production ready releases should not. If it’s Chrome 16 – the stable version – experimental support should not be baked in. The properties should be full available without the prefix.
Drop experimental prefixes – not entirely, but after a finite amount of time. It’s unacceptable and a disservice to the developers working with your browser. You need to give timelines to dropping these things.
Work with the working groups (…Apple).
