@Richard Connamacher and others: If you think the article is against prefixes or vendors innovating, you apparently read it without paying the least bit of attention to most of it. Let me highlight a few parts:
I did read that, and of the list you put forward how many were brought up as ideas without public implementations, put through a nice round table discussion among all browser venders and the W3C, before everyone then came together and implemented them in perfect unison? That’s just not how the process works.
The problems you pointed out in that list (like drag and drop) list have already been resolved by using webkit, moz, o, and ms vendor prefixes in CSS, and similar prefixes in JavaScript and the DOM. Browsers can experiment without stepping on the W3C’s or each others’ toes. Microsoft has been very bad with that and Netscape was terrible back in the day, but even Microsoft has finally started doing the right thing with prefixes.
And Apple has submitted their ideas to the W3C and worked to get support from other vendors. They just do so after releasing an experimental implementation first to show that it works and and works well. Which webkit CSS3 extension do you think didn’t follow that route?
Copy & paste the code below to embed this comment.
bzbarsky
Richard, for example Apple promoted -webkit-text-size-adjust for actual web development, quite heavily in fact. And it’s refused to submit that property for standardization so far. They might allow someone else to reverse engineer it. Or they might claim patent rights over it after someone puts in the work of reverse engineering and writing the spec, just like they did with the attempt to standardize touch events in the W3C.
If you think Apple is playing sandards ball here, you really need to open your eyes and look around.
Copy & paste the code below to embed this comment.
bzbarsky
Richard,
Apple has a ton of CSS extensions that it’s never submitted to standards bodies and that are in use on the web, especially on mobile devices. Its proprietary CSS mask stuff (instead of using the already-standard SVG masks), -webkit-font-size-adjust, -webkit-box-reflect, the list goes on and on. Some of these they have proposed an were rejected as far as I can tell (e.g. -webkit-box-reflect), while others they have just refused to propose to start with.
Did you even try looking through a list of -webkit properties before making your comments?
Copy & paste the code below to embed this comment.
Richard Connamacher
And didn’t even mention IBA. I was reading another comment thread at the same time where a poster was railing about about Apple’s epub-derived format and mixed it up with this one. My apologizes.
I don’t know if they’re promoting webkit-text-size-adjust “heavily”, there hasn’t even been a post about it on the webkit blog and it’s not one that I normally see people use. (The only webkit blog post I found mentioning it is from someone who prevented it and other cruft from being added by contentEditable.) But they do describe it in their official documentation for iOS web development so that counts as some level of promotion. All the pages I can find actively promoting its use are on independent sites (including yes, an article on A List Apart about mobile web development). I can find very little about it in official channels outside of that developer document.
Where’d you see that the W3C asked them to submit it for standardization or they flat-out refused?
Copy & paste the code below to embed this comment.
Pepe-el-toro
I remember coding specific HTML+CSS for Iexpoler and Netscape before 2004… It was a mess, most people who agree with this kind of crap practice are new comers that started playing cool designer in what? 2005-2006? When the was was over… I remember the ActiveX – Object – Embed stuff. Hacks for IE (Filter anyone?) and for others.
Copy & paste the code below to embed this comment.
bzbarsky
Richard,
webkit-text-size-adjust is quite prominent in Apple’s iOS “how to write sites for Safari on iOS” documentation. See for example https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#DOCUMENTATION/AppleApplications/Reference/SafariWebContent/AdjustingtheTextSize/AdjustingtheTextSize.html but there are plenty of other references to it there.
Of course it’s not on the WebKit blog; there is no support for this property in WebKit proper. It’s a proprietary Apple extension; the only browser that supports it, to my knowledge, is Safari on iOS. There is no support in Safari on OS X, for example, nor in Chrome last I checked.
As for the asked and refused part, there are several mentions in the CSS working group meeting minutes. That includes the minutes of the meeting where this whole prefix thing was brought up by Mozilla, Microsoft, and Opera. At the time the Apple representative made some noncommittal comments about how he’d see what he could to to convince the higher-ups at Apple to actually submit the property for standardization… and last I heard he’s failed thus far. See http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2012Feb/0313.html for the actual minutes; search for “text-size-adjust” which is mentioned several times. Note the comments from “sylvaing” (the Microsoft representative) about previous requests that it be submitted and the what “smfr” (the Apple representative) has to say.
37 Reader Comments
Back to the ArticleRichard Connamacher
I did read that, and of the list you put forward how many were brought up as ideas without public implementations, put through a nice round table discussion among all browser venders and the W3C, before everyone then came together and implemented them in perfect unison? That’s just not how the process works.
The problems you pointed out in that list (like drag and drop) list have already been resolved by using webkit, moz, o, and ms vendor prefixes in CSS, and similar prefixes in JavaScript and the DOM. Browsers can experiment without stepping on the W3C’s or each others’ toes. Microsoft has been very bad with that and Netscape was terrible back in the day, but even Microsoft has finally started doing the right thing with prefixes.
And Apple has submitted their ideas to the W3C and worked to get support from other vendors. They just do so after releasing an experimental implementation first to show that it works and and works well. Which webkit CSS3 extension do you think didn’t follow that route?
bzbarsky
Richard, for example Apple promoted -webkit-text-size-adjust for actual web development, quite heavily in fact. And it’s refused to submit that property for standardization so far. They might allow someone else to reverse engineer it. Or they might claim patent rights over it after someone puts in the work of reverse engineering and writing the spec, just like they did with the attempt to standardize touch events in the W3C.
If you think Apple is playing sandards ball here, you really need to open your eyes and look around.
bzbarsky
Richard,
Apple has a ton of CSS extensions that it’s never submitted to standards bodies and that are in use on the web, especially on mobile devices. Its proprietary CSS mask stuff (instead of using the already-standard SVG masks), -webkit-font-size-adjust, -webkit-box-reflect, the list goes on and on. Some of these they have proposed an were rejected as far as I can tell (e.g. -webkit-box-reflect), while others they have just refused to propose to start with.
Did you even try looking through a list of -webkit properties before making your comments?
Richard Connamacher
And didn’t even mention IBA. I was reading another comment thread at the same time where a poster was railing about about Apple’s epub-derived format and mixed it up with this one. My apologizes.
I don’t know if they’re promoting webkit-text-size-adjust “heavily”, there hasn’t even been a post about it on the webkit blog and it’s not one that I normally see people use. (The only webkit blog post I found mentioning it is from someone who prevented it and other cruft from being added by contentEditable.) But they do describe it in their official documentation for iOS web development so that counts as some level of promotion. All the pages I can find actively promoting its use are on independent sites (including yes, an article on A List Apart about mobile web development). I can find very little about it in official channels outside of that developer document.
Where’d you see that the W3C asked them to submit it for standardization or they flat-out refused?
Pepe-el-toro
I remember coding specific HTML+CSS for Iexpoler and Netscape before 2004… It was a mess, most people who agree with this kind of crap practice are new comers that started playing cool designer in what? 2005-2006? When the was was over… I remember the ActiveX – Object – Embed stuff. Hacks for IE (Filter anyone?) and for others.
Now try to do a better CSS, look at this line:
background-image: linear-gradient(right , rgba(255,255,255,0.2) 49%, rgba(173,173,173,0) 0%);
background-image: -o-linear-gradient(right , rgba(255,255,255,0.2) 49%, rgba(173,173,173,0) 0%);
background-image: -moz-linear-gradient(right , rgba(173,173,173,0) 0%, rgba(255,255,255,0.2) 49%);
background-image: -webkit-linear-gradient(right , rgba(255,255,255,0.2) 49%, rgba(173,173,173,0) 0%);
background-image: -ms-linear-gradient(right , rgba(255,255,255,0.2) 49%, rgba(173,173,173,0) 0%);
background-image: -webkit-gradient(
linear,
right top,
left top,
color-stop(0.49, rgba(255,255,255,0.2)),
color-stop(0, rgba(173,173,173, 0))
);
WTF is wrong with the people who agree with this? Are they Apple fanboys or what? Now inst M$ the evil one…
bzbarsky
Richard,
webkit-text-size-adjust is quite prominent in Apple’s iOS “how to write sites for Safari on iOS” documentation. See for example https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#DOCUMENTATION/AppleApplications/Reference/SafariWebContent/AdjustingtheTextSize/AdjustingtheTextSize.html but there are plenty of other references to it there.
Of course it’s not on the WebKit blog; there is no support for this property in WebKit proper. It’s a proprietary Apple extension; the only browser that supports it, to my knowledge, is Safari on iOS. There is no support in Safari on OS X, for example, nor in Chrome last I checked.
As for the asked and refused part, there are several mentions in the CSS working group meeting minutes. That includes the minutes of the meeting where this whole prefix thing was brought up by Mozilla, Microsoft, and Opera. At the time the Apple representative made some noncommittal comments about how he’d see what he could to to convince the higher-ups at Apple to actually submit the property for standardization… and last I heard he’s failed thus far. See http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2012Feb/0313.html for the actual minutes; search for “text-size-adjust” which is mentioned several times. Note the comments from “sylvaing” (the Microsoft representative) about previous requests that it be submitted and the what “smfr” (the Apple representative) has to say.
Calatorul Moldovean
Very interesting and informative! Great article.