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.
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.