These have been eventful couple of days for web developers. CSS Working Group chair called on everyone to use all (most?) vendor prefixes and stop making websites for WebKit which is becoming a new (mobile) IE6. Responses have been numerous, including ppk who in his usual obnoxious manner ^[1] made some good points. Testing on mobile devices is an unsolved problem (who wants or can afford to buy so many almost immediately obsolete gadgets?) and introducing -beta- (maybe also -alpha-) prefix would simplify our lives while keeping most benefits of vendor prefixes.

I like -beta- idea and I think adding -alpha- might be even better. There’s still a problem of resolving syntax conflicts between different implementation which I think has a simple solution that closely mimics what browsers already do:

When parsing CSS browsers should apply the last matching -beta-/-alpha- directive they fully understand.

Browsers already ignore directives they don’t understand and they apply last directive found when there are multiple candidates for a DOM node.

Such behavior would give us less CSS code to write and maintain, have predictable behavior and keep browser experimentation without favoring one. I have troubles finding negative sides of this approach, but do let me know if you can think of one.

1. I deeply dislike his complaining about simplistic view of others while himself generalizing and name-calling (the lazy and stupid lot of us). Alas it’s not good to read only people you like and agree with. ↩
2. Almost everything I write on this blog has an intended audience of one: me (no, really!). Why I sometimes write posts like this, which don’t, is a mistery  since their expected and actual effect on anyone is…none.