The web has always been a laboratory for new ideas—both in design and for code. The code for the web is primarily defined by the World Wide Web Consortium W3C, a special group of elves who carefully plan how we render web pages. This august body is thorough, but often slow.
The CSS Workgroup, a part of the W3C, develops its standards starting with a working draft that is open to public scrutiny and then becoming a candidate recommendation, to a proposed recommendation, to finally a recommendation. But this process can take years. To get things moving, browser manufacturers will often introduce their own CSS properties in advance of them becoming a recommendation or even placed into a draft. When the web was young, the browsers would simply define the code as they saw fit, even if this meant that it wouldn’t work or even conflicted with other browsers. For example, one browser might add a style for the mouse cursor appearance. In Internet Explorer, one of the styles was called “hand” while other browsers used “pointer.”
To prevent this from happening, browser extensions were implemented to set off officially approved CSS code from code being tested by the browser manufacturers. These allow designers to use styles that are still experimental in a particular browser, without fear that it will cause problems in other browsers, and how allowed CSS3 to already start to grow, especially when applied with the philosophy of progressive enhancement.
Read the entire article CSS3 Is Here! Browser Extensions in Depth on Peacpit.com »
Tags: Design, Technology by jason
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