This one is going to run and run. By this I mean FF et al supporting some -webkit specific features. Note: that's some not all.
At first I wasn't too worried, now I'm beginning to think that I should be. A List Apart has published two articles; one is Tantek's explaination of why FF are doing this and the other Lea's [I think] best-practice approach.
Now, given that Tantek was responsible for some of the ugliest hacks ever... Probably I'm being unfair.
I'm of a strange age [in web-terms]; too young to remember the browser wars, too young to remember when IE6 was the only browser in town. [Although I do remember the BPOS (buggy piece of s...e) that was IE 4.7 for Mac] In my day it was all about validated XHTML 1.0. As long as we separated presentation from content we were doing our job. Even if it was an utter bugger to get IE6 to play with us presentation-wise.
In my last post on this subject I suggested that there didn't seem to be too much harm in letting browser-vendors set the agenda. I'm now falling back from that position.
The problem is that, because certain, let's call them what they are, layout-engines, have locked down the mobile platform, other engines have to honour their CSS. Perhaps in a different way. This is bad.
A couple of weeks ago I gave up on FF as my day-to-day browser, the thing now is a bloated cowp. A sad travesty of the Phoenix that it was. For me it has gone the way of IE6. The way of all browsers in fact.
I still use FF as my developer browser, [it has FireBug] but I now use Chrome for my trolling. I've noticed that some of my sites are broken. Which is annoying as I'd tested them. The goalposts have been changed. Given that Chrome updates, silently, about once a week, testing is now useless. The goalposts could be anywhere anyday.
This is the problem. We knew what we had to do when we were mired in the IE6 fiasco—create standards. And have browsers [and developers] stick to them.
The last time I wrote about this I thought that I could just walk away from this mess, but I can't. True, I don't use experimental-vendor-specific attributes. But if we don't have standards? Then the floor can be whipped out from under us at any time.
It's odd, this is almost exactly LOWSRC When you play with computers you'll be fixing the same problem forever if you don't watch out. That seems to be the way that we are headed.