A sad day - Opera will support -webkit prefixes
opera webkit
Today something which I consider sad happened, Opera announced that it will be supporting some -webkit prefixes. (netmagazine.com) They do so, because:
cannot reasonably choose to remain incompatible with a significant part of the web, when it's technically simple to enable the features that these websites are using
I think this is wrong, for the same reasons that Opera thinks it is right. Don't get me wrong, I sort of understand why they do this and I have the utmost respect for the Opera people. The reason they are doing this is that developers are writing :
-webkit-foo: bar;While they should be writing:
-webkit-foo:bar;
-o-foo:bar;
-ms-foo:bar;
-moz-foo:bar;
foo:bar;
While I think that trying to get sites to work is a good thing and one that Opera is very good at, I think that supporting -webkit prefixes will not help getting people write proper code, which this is all about. It is only helping the bad seeds that will not be motivated to write good code, code for the web, NOT for browsers.
I can't help but think of the first browser wars, when the majority was writing for Internet Explorer and only a small group wrote for the web (Asterix anyone?) and in the end we won. Or so we thought... I hope that now a larger group will do the right thing and write for the web, and not for browsers.
So will you join me and write to the specs, do the right thing? I hope you do...