Category Archives: standards

Misdirection

February 15, 2012 – 4:04 pm

As the over-heated CSS vendor prefix debate rages, I can’t help but note the mounting pile of logical fallacies and downright poor reasoning being deployed. Some context is in order. Your Moment Of Zen The backdrop to this debate is that CSS is absolutely the worst, least productive part of the web platform. Apps teams [...]

By alex | Also posted in chrome, economics, google, javascript, licensing, mobile, opensource, openweb, programming, webdev, work | Comments (32)

Vendor Prefixes Are A Rousing Success

November 18, 2011 – 7:36 am

tl;dr version: Henri Sivonen’s arguments against vendor prefixing for CSS properties focus on harm without considering value, which in turn has caused him to come to a non-sensical set of conclusions and recommendations. Progress is a process, and vendor prefixes have been critical in accelerating that process for CSS. For a while now I’ve been [...]

By alex | Also posted in openweb, politics, webdev | Comments (26)

Real Constructors & WebIDL Last Call

October 3, 2011 – 7:10 am

For those who haven’t been following the progress of WebIDL — and really, how could you not? An IDL? For the web? I’d like to subscribe to your newsletter… — the standard is now in last call, which is W3C for “alllllllllllmost done”. Which it is not. Before I get to why, let me first [...]

By alex | Also posted in javascript, programming, webdev | Comments (18)

Half Lives

March 9, 2011 – 9:04 am

I’m headed to Austin soon for spring break SxSWi, and this year I’m lucky and grateful to be representing Chrome on the always-packed browser panel (more usable Lanyrd talk page here). The context for this year’s panel is interesting to me — a couple of years into a renewed era of browser competition, users have [...]

By alex | Also posted in openweb, programming, webdev | Comments (9)

CSS Variables Are The Future

August 11, 2008 – 4:52 am

or: “Reports of the Harm Caused By CSS Variables Are Greatly Exaggerated” To say that CSS is abominable isn’t controversial. The implementations are leading the spec in some places, and we’re getting real progress there. Firefox’s rounded corners and WebKit’s drop-shadows, declarative animations, background tiling, and CSS variables are all hugely important and liberating. But [...]

By alex | Also posted in openweb, webdev | Tagged | Comments (16)