Re: What to do with browser-specific tags as they become standarized

[Senff]

This is one of those things that break my mind as well. I’m ridiculously torn about the use of vendor-specific prefixes, I do understand the need for them at first, but they’re such a pain to actually work with. Excellent question.

However, the only answer I could probably come up with, is that’s it’s probably not standard enough yet (as in, supported/approved/etc by W3C). Only as soon that is the case, we can assume that a non-webkit browser will interpret the tag exactly the same way a webkit browser does.

Until then, it’s possible that various browsers do different things with it, so in order to NOT have non-webkit browsers do things you DON’T want them to do, you don’t give them the non-vendor-specific version.

(that sounded confusing!)

Mozilla could do something completely different with (non-vendor specific) box-shadow than Webkit. So, until the standard is established, you give Mozilla it’s own version with -moz-box-shadow and Webkit it’s own version with -webkit-box-shadow.

In short, I would just say, don’t use box-shadow (instead of -webkit-box-shadow) just cause Webkit accepts it — it may do funky things to other browsers, whereas you can be sure that -webkit-box-shadow won’t mess up Mozilla, Opera, IE, and all the other non-webkit ones.

Obviously, this is all about official standards. If you feel that the generic box-shadow looks fine in all browsers, by all means go with that.

(someone, please jump in, I’m confusing the hell out of myself here!!) ;)