How the World Could Solve the Vendor Prefix Problem in One Month

Stop trying to solve more than one problem in one go, it won’t work. Proposals for the solution to vendor prefixes have tried to solve additional problems with vendor prefixes (that is, vendor behaviour & spec change) by adding more complexity, ‘features’ and meaning to prefixes. Stop making things complicated.

Let’s solve one thing, simply, and right now.

I am asking you, browser vendors, to add “-x” as an alias to your vendor prefix in your web browser. That means that any instance of -x-feature in the CSS will be treated as -webkit-feature in WebKit, -moz-feature in Gecko, -o-feature in Opera and so on and so-forth.

Why does this solve the vendor prefix problem?

1. Incomplete Features Are Still Incomplete

It’s good practice to always include the un-prefixed declaration at the bottom of a list of vendor prefixes—thusly:

-webkit-feature: myway;
   -moz-feature: myway;
    -ms-feature: myway;
     -o-feature: myway;
        feature: highway;

But that relies upon waiting until that feature becomes unprefixed and does nothing to do away with the multiple list of vendor prefixes until that time.

How about:

-x-feature: myway;
   feature: highway;

?

That reduces the repetition whilst each browser still sees its own feature (-webkit, -moz &c.)

2. Vendors Will Be Vendors and That Will Not Change

You cannot threaten, cajole or otherwise incite Apple (or any vendor) to stop being a massively successful company that will do what it damn well likes.

Vendor prefixes are necessary. There are tons of internal features of different engines that are never going to be standardised because they are not designed to be exposed to the web or are used in producing the browser UI or are there for just plain old competition. Standards take time and companies have to ship software.

We can’t stop Apple being Apple, and we shouldn’t try stop lazy developers being lazy developers through syntax. That is an education problem that has to be solved at a level much higher than syntax. -x is incredibly lazy—for vendors and developers alike—but it’s lazy and good, rather than lazy and bad like vendor-specific prefixes.

-x will succeed because it’s lazy in a copy-paste web development world and not busy trying to hit vendors or developers over the head with a shame stick, or trying to educate the world about best-practices all within a prefix.

Imagine that in order for HTML5 to be adopted, developers had to update every HTML4 page out there? That’s what vendor prefixes are, in-effect, requiring. -x- is like the HTML5 doctype. Old code doesn’t have to change, compatibility goes both ways, we code for the future and the future supports us.

3. Specs Change, Browsers Differ

The -alpha, -beta proposal nonsense doesn’t work because it tries to imbue spec / standardisation ideas in the I-don’t-care-about-this-crap-copy-paste web developer world where old code doesn’t get updated unless it breaks horribly.

If you are using any vendor prefixed features then they might break in the future. That is reality and you can’t (and shouldn’t) try and change vendor prefixes to solve that problem.

Different vendor prefixes don’t work because it assumes that every vendor implementation of a new feature will be—by deafult—incompatible. That means that every time a vendor adds support for a feature that matches another vendor, you have to fix your code even when it’s working. -x works because it assumes that vendor implementations will be the same, unless they are different. You only change your code when it breaks. With -x, when a vendor adds support for a feature, you get it for free without having to rewrite the whole damn ’Web.

Let’s imagine this code currently only works in WebKit because only it supports that feature:

-x-feature: highway;
   feature: highway;

And then Mozilla come along and say it should be done a different way. You can just override your code:

  -x-feature: highway;
     feature: highway;
-moz-feature: myway;

You Can Do It, and You Can Do It Now

Mozilla, Apple, Google, Microsoft. You could all implement this small change very easily. You only have to alias -x to your vendor prefix. It is not asking much. There’s no standardisation involved, there’s no spec (or “alias -x to your vendor prefix” is it), you don’t even have to arrange a meeting with each other.

Apple and Microsoft both have browsers in beta (Safari 6 and IE10). Including this tiny change would open the flood gates to developer support. Google can ship the change in 24 hours with Chrome’s update mechanism. Mozilla could ship it officially in 6 weeks. There is little holding back any of you.

Here is the gauntlet I am throwing down to solve the problem of vendor prefixes:

Announce, or ship—officially, or as a development build—support for -x within one Month’s time (July 13^th 2012).

I believe that to be quite doable, and I hope to hear from you soon.