IE and Mozilla have now committed to supporting -webkit- prefixed properties.
The obvious problem is that the W3C is too slow and cumbersome for many people's desires and expectations of the web. IE6 came with a suite of incredibly powerful functionality that the rest of browser-land is only now catching up to (filter: anyone?). The problem then was that some of the earliest webapps were designed specifically for IE, back when there was no conceivable way of forking the code to achieve similar functionality in other browsers. VML was submitted 2 years before SVG started taking shape. IE6's lofty goals were almost reinstated in the "HTML5 in the broadest sense" that the W3 tried to make a PR splash about (embedded multimedia, file-system API, seamless vector graphics in HTML, CSS3 transforms & filters). But once again, people have come to expect awesome stuff that the W3C is too slow to ratify to a universal consensus. So the responsibility (which, I agree, ultimately rests on website authors) comes down to managing expectations. It's tough to say no, especially when there's a lot of money in it and many people in the trade of web development are inclined to exploratory hacking anyway. It's becoming increasingly more difficult to tell people you can't, in good conscience, serve up code relying on unratified specifications, when implementation of such functionality is ubiquitous (and you know how to do it). A few years ago web development studios started finding the willpower to tell clients they wouldn't commit to like-for-like experiences in legacy Internet Explorer versions, and for a while standards-compliance seemed to be that bit more tenable – but recently I've come across numerous situations where people will say they only care about Chrome & iOS support. As regards the 'reasonableness' of these various expectations, I think W3C compliant validity is at its most applicable when it comes to web sites consisting of many documents: you want these documents to be consistent with each-other and marked up to universal standards for reasons of posterity & universal access. For my part, what I've been working on for the better part of the last year would be more accurately described as web apps: there's a single HTML document and it acts more as a wrapper for dynamic functionality. The term 'document' barely applies, and the use-cases are so esoteric and business-critical that the client will happily use a specific browser version in order to guarantee expected behaviour. Regards, Barney Carroll barney.carr...@gmail.com +44 7429 177278 barneycarroll.com On 7 October 2014 13:53, Philip Taylor <p.tay...@rhul.ac.uk> wrote: > > > Barney Carroll wrote: > > I'm wondering how differently my career might have worked out if all >> those times IE came up I'd just told the client to get onto Bill Gates >> about it. >> > > If /every/ W3C-compliant web site had carried that text, the world might > now be a very different (and much better) place ... I love Windows (7), > completely fail to understand the masochistic appeal of *X, but nonetheless > deeply wish that Mr Gates (and Mr Google, and all the rest of the Big Boys) > cared more about complying to standards and less about seeking to define > them. This guy identifies many of the problems in a nuthell : > > http://www.sitepoint.com/w3c-css-webkit-prefix-crisis/ > > Philip Taylor > ______________________________________________________________________ css-discuss [css-d@lists.css-discuss.org] http://www.css-discuss.org/mailman/listinfo/css-d List wiki/FAQ -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/ List policies -- http://css-discuss.org/policies.html Supported by evolt.org -- http://www.evolt.org/help_support_evolt/
