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by jballanc 5238 days ago
If you honestly believe that a naming dispute could be resolved in 1 hour, then I'd wager you haven't been programming very long. As the famous saying goes -- "The two hardest things in programming are: naming, cache invalidation, and off-by-one errors."

This was just the quickest/most famous/easiest example I could think of. The other I referenced is more subtle. For gradients before standardization, Firefox included the type of gradient in the property definition, "background: -moz-linear-gradient(...)", whereas Webkit made it a parameter to the function, "background: -webkit-gradient(linear, ...)".
1 comments
alextgordon 5238 days ago
It could be resolved in one hour. It could be resolved by a coin toss for god's sake. Heads: webkit's syntax. Tails: mozilla's syntax. Done.

The problem is that neither vendor is willing to solve it in one hour. They want to get their own way. It's simply arrogance.

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jballanc 5238 days ago
"Never attribute to malice..."

Webkit Dev (speaking to Webkit Program Manager) -- Hey! I've figured out a way we can give divs rounded corners.

Webkit PM -- That's cool, what do you call it?

Webkit Dev -- Well, for the bottom right it's "border-bottom-right-radius"

Webkit PM -- Cool.

<some time later...>

Webkit PM (to Webkit Dev) -- Hey! I just got off the phone with Firefox PM. He says they've also developed a way to give divs rounded corners.

Webkit Dev -- That's cool! I guess it was a needed feature.

Webkit PM -- Yeah...only problem is the name. They decided to call theirs "border-radius-bottomright".

Webkit Dev -- Oh.

Webkit PM -- Sooo, yeah. If you could just change that name.

Webkit Dev -- But we already GM'd the build with that name in it. To change it we'll have to back out of the GM, requalify the build, change the documentation, send out new seeds, redo internationalization, send it back to QA, and declare a new GM. That will push out the release by 3 weeks, and besides, I have 20 bugs in my current backlog that are completely unrelated to border radii. How important is this?

Webkit PM -- Oh...not that important I guess...

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tomjen3 5238 days ago
Sorry but no. I have been alive long enough to know that you always assume malice. Especially with big companies.
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