Is webkit the new ie6?

All browsers are on the verge of implementing the webkit vendor prefix because developers have been building for webkit only specifically. This old article from Bruce Lawson (of Opera) rings even more true today. He states that the horrid broken non standard state of the ie6 web was not always seen as that. IE6 was the first to support many features of CSS and honestly was a step in the right direction. The main problem was that it was only one step, and then no more for years. The web dev community built according to the browser rather than according to standards! Doing this created the trap that is IE still today, as it's forced to support old specific non-standards code as well as future thinking standards based and everything between. Let's build for standards and let the browsers support it rather than bend to each browsers whim and build for them specifically. This creates a disjointed complicated setting where we worry about browsers and OS still. In a time when we are diverging and numbers of browsers and devices are compounding, standards is our sanity! Please, for the sake of … well, standards!

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Bruce Lawson’s personal site 
: In praise of Internet Explorer 6

Bruce Lawson's blog, focussing on web accessibility, web standards, travellers tales, and music

The CSS Vendor Prefix Debacle continues

The Opera Browser will soon be released to support the webkit prefix, which was designed and spec'ed to only be supported for css properties in development by webkit browsers (safari and chrome). Who is to blame? Opera points the finger squarely at webkit for not following standard procedures and at developers who aren't writing according to standards and aren't even including the prefix-free version of properties in their code. I'd be interested in seeing some real data as to how many sites are doing this and what properties they are using. It seems like a horrible practice and I've not met anyone who's fessed up to doing it on production level projects. They should be at least using the non vendor property and are most likely using some sort of starte package, boilerplate, framework or preprocessor or tool that does all the prefixing for them. So where's the data?

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Opera confirms WebKit prefix usage | News | .net magazine
Open web under fire as Opera argues author errors forced its hand