Unfortunately they were released to the general developer public and then of course abused because that’s what the masses do to things. Makes me sound like an elitist but I’m so pissed right now…
I agree, but disagree in the chain of events. The prefixes were there to allow vendors to begin/test development of their REs ( this is obvious), in order to do so ‘bleeding edge’ designers will make demos ( I remember the webkit at-at animation fondly), those demos will be seen by a mix of 10% web designers and 90% clients looking for web designers ( they of course don’t wanna pay someone who’s is elite) . So they ask regular web designers (or ask their HR depts. to ask their developer candidates) if they can do this(showing prefix-based demos) … some say no, some are honest and say they cant but that they would advice against it because… ( reasoning follows) and some merely start to use prefixes ( sometimes w/o even using or researching other vendors, in other words what ever UA did it first must be the only one to develop for). Well, the first group is labeled “behind the times” the next group is labeled "difficult to work with, stubborn and chasing some impractical NERD thing called ‘standards’ , and the last group gets $$.
Guess which groups grows.
So it’s really not developers as client demand which mus t be altered. I am sure that conscientious developer saw the webtkit animations 3 or 4 years ago… and thought it was neat; toyed with it, to be ready when it was broad support; but did not offer it as a service… until some client said… “I am looking for someone who can do this for me :: shows demo page::” ( see sequence above).
five or six years ago if you could incorporate rounded corners and drop shadows into a CSS design you ‘knew your stuff’ AND CLIENTS would be ambivalent about CSS, not because of cross browser support or semantics… but because ‘it LOOKED blocky’) Consequently he had a border-radius and box-shadow be one of the first thing “released” to the general public. Now every 13year old can claim to do an ‘awesome’ Myspace like web design, by default.
I hate to say it, but if a feature is in a public release UA… then it is already " working towards" standards. Not the ones we were envisioning, maybe, but at that point they become part of the immutable web landscape. Recall that IE was the first to support CSS, and there were only two vendors to deal with in those days. Turns out that being first is not always being best … or even right. But later IE could not/ would not change to support standards for fear of “breaking the web”. So, would it have been preferable for no CSS to be used UNTIL every vendor got on board?
The solution back then ( and there were only two or three browsers to contend with) was HACKs and/or conditional comments. To be honest, I like vendor prefixing because it avoids BOTH. Or was supposed to anyhow. Without prefixing, all development would have to be lowest common denominator. I honestly felt, the first time I saw prefixing that included a SET of vendors for the same declaration ) That it was a great stride to ward standards… and toward support of UAs that would eventually become the ‘legacy’ UAs once all vendors adopted standards and prefixes could be dropped for the sake of brevity. Tell me this doesn’t beat the clever, but unstable, *hack?
It’s a rule of nature. Support will always be stratified. Someone will be first t offer a feature and other will follow. In some cases the feature will be right from the start, in other it will develop to be more powerful and complex, and in others it will be radically different.
But no one is ever happy. Now that we can do effect with pure CSS and with less non-semantic hooks… and with 100% knowledge that it will be supported in the TARGETED UA w/o affecting other UAs then the complaint is… “all these” vendors… “Hey I got it… let’s tell everyone to JUST USE ‘webkit’ so we wont have to type twice.” Besides, the point is to design for graceful degradation. It the client request was for a CSS-only animated web cartoon… then the request itself was the problem.
I will admit, that the whole prefix thing harms the “one web one way” goal, but I am sure once the dust settles we will return to that path again… with far less clean up than was needed for old IE.