Vendor-prefixed CSS Property Overview

Posted August 6th, 2010 in HTML and CSS and Offsite Articles

CSS allows for vendor-specific extensions which can start with a dash or an underscore, although in practise they all appear to start with a dash. Although this is declared in the official syntax reference, the W3C does recommend that authors should avoid vendor-specific extensions. Nevertheless, they exist and this post links through to an overview of all the vendor-specific extensions available.

Vendor-prefixed CSS Property Overview

Peter Beverloo posted the Vendor-prefixed CSS Property Overview on his blog and it appears to be regularly updated. It includes the prefixes for Gecko (i.e. Firefox and deritives); WebKit (i.e. Konqueror, Safari and Chrome); Presto (Opera); and Trident (Internet Explorer).

Some of those in the list are available in the actual specifications as well, as a draft or candidate recommendation. In the case of these ones there are links through to the appropriate specification.

View the full list here.

But... CSS vendor prefixes can be considered harmful

Meanwhile, over at Quirksmode, they posted "CSS vendor prefixes considered harmful" which looks into the vendor prefixes in some detail and why they are bad.

From the article:

It’s time to abolish all vendor prefixes. They’ve become solutions for which there is no problem, and they are actively harming web standards.

Vendor prefixes force web developers to make their style sheets much more verbose than is necessary, while also running the risk of accidentally forgetting one set of vendor-prefixed declarations.

Besides, why do we need to use several declarations for obtaining one single effect? Weren’t web standards supposed to prevent that sort of thing?

Read the full post (and comments) for more details.