

Vendor Prefixes Are Hurting the Web - robin_reala
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/vendor-prefixes/

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cheald
Holy hell, vendor prefixes aren't hurting the web, the 6.5MB of fonts that
that page downloads to display a single blog post are. That's not a flash of
unstyled content, it's a financial quarter of unstyled content. At first I
thought that the blog post was some clever demonstration of how things are
broken because of vendor prefixes, when really it was just the browser
blocking for 20 seconds while it downloaded the fonts so that it could display
25kb of text.

Now, on to the post.

It sounds an awful lot like the author is sad that people are using -webkit
browser prefixes rather than -moz browser prefixes, because most mobile
browsers run webkit. The author seems to work for Mozilla, and this reads an
awful lot like bemoaning that people like webkit prefixes over Mozilla
prefixes. He seems to be asserting that a developer must use one and only one
vendor prefix, and completely ignores the possibility that you can actually
have each browser render its own version of the same CSS effect by specifying
multiple rules with multiple vendor prefixes.

> Engine-specific content is bad for users. If a site uses CSS with the
> -webkit- prefix, users of Firefox, Opera or IE get a worse experience even
> if they implemented the same feature with their own prefix or without a
> prefix.

CSS is not content. CSS is presentation. Say it until it makes sense. If
you're serving different _content_ to the user based on CSS vendor prefixes,
you have bigger problems.

Even then, pixel-perfect presentation across all major browsers shouldn't be
the goal. Very few people will care that things render the exact same
everywhere. What you should care about is a consistent experience _per
browser_. When you're looking at a site in IE, the site should be consistent
in IE. When in Webkit, the experience should be consistent with itself, etc.
If you insist on demanding pixel-perfection, then I invite you to look at your
site in, say, Webkit on a Windows machine, an OS X machine, and a Linux
machine. It's going to be different; the use different font rendering engines,
which dramatically affects the look-and-feel of the website. You aren't going
to achieve Grand Unified Omniplatform Pixel Perfection. Get over that
expectation and start designing experiences that are self-consistent per
platform.

