Dustin Curtis is an asshole. ============================ Sunday 12 February 2012 16:04 For the benefit of the weak of mind it would have been so much easier to let Microsoft win the browser wars ten years ago. That would have given us for example a nice vector based graphics implementation, hardware accelerated graphics effects and web typography. At this point when WebKit seems to have the same advantages as Internet Explorer had ten years ago mongering the killing of W3C is like supporting democracy only to get into power and then start supporting dictatorship. There is of course nothing wrong with dictatorship when you're the dictator or part of it's clan. So buy some shares of $AAPL or $GOOG and start building WebKit only sites: there is nothing wrong with vendor lock-in if you're the vendor. Standards aren't designed for the current MVP development mentality of the minimum viable developers that most web developers seem to be these days. If your only maintenance issue with web standards would be giving an intern the login to your WordPress site, you shouldn't care about web standards and vendor prefixes. And only the developer with a minimal viable mindset would interpret vendor prefixes as being "experimental", and propose to promoting them to have only -alpha- or -beta- meaning. They are just a mechanism for allowing a namespace within the syntax of valid CSS so you don't have to split it at the MIME type. Which is nice in case you're working on a closed system in which you have control over both the rendering engine and the code it's rendering. And of course Apple and Google consider the whole internet their closed system in which they soon have control, with or without W3C. Combine that with a myriad of n00b web developers who bet on having moved on to something else when their standards-ignorant code hits the fan in a couple of years, and Flash seems like a good idea. The real issue is that with the propaganda of HTML5 as the set of new HTML and CSS combined with JavaScript APIs in a modern browser it hardly makes sense to define future HTML and CSS standards from the perspective of a platform that lacks JavaScript. If other browser vendors don't start supporting -webkit prefixes any JavaScript library provider could do the same thing by automatically providing a polyfill for it. If a site doesn't work without JavaScript anyway, the problem that it only uses the -webkit vendor prefixes is academic. by Roland van Ipenburg http://www.xs4all.nl/~ipenburg/blog/posts/work/2012/02/12/dustin-curtis-is-an-asshole/