Web Standards

A controversy sparked a few days ago about Daniel Glazman’s call to web developers. To make the long story short, Apple and Google have made many additions to the WebKit rendering engine (CSS Transforms, Animations, etc.); quickly, web developers started using them. However, as there were available in a WebKit browser at the time, many did not future-proof their stylesheets by adding the competing browser-specific properties.

Until now, I had only seen and read essays agreeing wholeheartedly with Glazman: websites with WebKit-only properties break the web. Most compare the situation to the times when IE6 reigned upon the internet.

However, Dustin Curtis tackles the issue differently: the problem is the organizations, not the browser-specific properties.

What led to the current situation isn’t Apple’s and Google’s constant innovation in the field; this isn’t either Mozilla’s or Opera’s inability to cope with the change quick enough. What led to it is the ineffectiveness of the CSS Working Group and of the W3C: it takes literally years for a feature to be included in the standards.

So, now Mozilla, Opera and Microsoft are waking up and feel forced to implement -webkit-prefixed CSS properties because they are no longer¹ at the top of the game, and are even losing market share.

We’ve been imprisoned in this standardization process for years, and while it has certainly been beneficial at first, it has now become the source of disparities between browsers. For instance, web developers have asked for years to have among other things variables, mix-ins, classes, hierarchy, and parent selectors. Since the organizations in charge have failed to deliver anything in this regard, tools have sprouted all over the web to process stylesheets and add these features. While they add a great deal of usefulness, these tools are bloated because they are not native.

And now, because the organizations’s inefficiency has stricken again, we must add another one to our toolkit: prefixers.

Either kill prefixes, or kill this standardization process.