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by afs35mm 4331 days ago
I'm not entirely sure this is an accurate analogy. vendor prefixes solved a need. Why should we be developing to the lowest common denominator?

I think we should also watch out for link-bait SEO headlines such as "Why Webkit is the New IE6 (The Trap of Vendor Prefixes)"...
2 comments
masklinn 4331 days ago
> I'm not entirely sure this is an accurate analogy. vendor prefixes solved a need.

No. It tried to solve two different needs: proprietary stable APIs and unstable/in-flux specs. And the abuse of the latter forced browsers to drop the use-case entirely and hide features behind flags because developers could not be trusted to act responsibly, so it definitely didn't solve that problem.

> Why should we be developing to the lowest common denominator?

That's not developing to the LCD, that developers deploying half-specified and unstable APIs in production.

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tomjen3 4331 days ago
Why do you blame developers? The fault lies with the standards community for not standardizing much faster (at most a week after the second browser has support for that feature) and for MS for developing a browser at a glacial pace.
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masklinn 4331 days ago
> Why do you blame developers?

Because the fault lies with them and no one else, no matter how in denial you are.

> The fault lies with the standards community for not standardizing much faster (at most a week after the second browser has support for that feature)

That doesn't even make sense, standards work is not "you shipped some random unspecified and mostly broken pile of shit and some other bloke was convinced to half-implement something which kinda looks similar if you squint so let's just call it standandard :shipit:"

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tomjen3 4331 days ago
Do you have any backup for your arguments?
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ntakasaki 4331 days ago
http://www.webmonkey.com/2012/02/webkit-isnt-breaking-the-we...

Co-Chairmain of the web standards group:

http://www.glazman.org/weblog/dotclear/index.php?post/2012/0...

Mozilla on the issue. http://alistapart.com/article/the-vendor-prefix-predicament-...

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ntakasaki 4331 days ago
The problem isn't that developers should be developing for the lowest common denominator. It is that the prefixes are not being dropped by websites even after other browsers start implementing the feature, or it's that they continue to use the webkit prefix for new websites.
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