What would happen in the situation that a browser has developed a non-prefixed property, which later becomes a standard, but with different functionality?
Dropping vendor prefixes entirely is a bad idea. The syntax for gradients has been revised a couple of times. Without vendor prefixes you'd have to pick which version to support, back when different browsers had different implementations.
I would prefer the following 2 pronged approach:
* First, prefixed properties in nightlies/dev versions of browsers, such as Canary. This would allow testing, without imposing a specific standard. Once a proposal is written, implement it without a prefix in the normal way.
* Second, we need a tool to update our CSS files automagically. I should be able to use the non-prefixed version and the prefixed version added by the tool. Apache, Nginx should have an extension which does this automatically and could easily be implemented by CDNs.
We've done this before and handled it fine. In JavaScript you can test the features, in CSS you end up duplicating a few lines of CSS-- see the gradients example: http://paulirish.com/2012/vendor-prefixes-are-not-developer-...