Daniel Glazman, a web standards figure and CSS working group co-chair, writes about the open web, CSS parsing and browser tooling.
HN links it for his call to action on WebKit and vendor prefixes, his JSCSSP CSS parser, and his Quaxe project.
Daniel Glazman (W3C CSS Working Group co-chair) gives a few more examples from a CSS point of view: http://www.glazman.org/weblog/dotclear/index.php?post/2010/04/30/Innovation-browsers-CSS-and-chutzpah
Yet another example is "viewport" meta tag, which Mobile Safari introduced, Android later adopted, and which we (Mozilla) are now adding to mobile Firefox. There's no spec for this anywhere; it will probably be implemented in half a dozen mobile browser engines before even a draft spec is written.
Now, it's clear from all these examples that Sachin and Joe's description of the situation are factually wrong. But that doesn't mean they don't have a point. The problems they feel with web development may indeed exist, but with some other cause than the one they imagined.
These links [1][2] provide some reasoning behind not using vendor extensions. The second is referenced in the article we're commenting on. I find it difficult to understand why much vitriol needs to be expended.
[1] http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2010/03/css_vendor_pref.html
[2] http://www.glazman.org/weblog/dotclear/index.php?post/2012/02/09/CALL-FOR-ACTION:-THE-OPEN-WEB-NEEDS-YOU-NOW
>The same problem doesn't pose (for now) on mthe mobile space, since there are multiple different browsers competing - even if in different OSs each - which means the web devs are forced to remain more or less on spec.
Webkit is pretty much the defacto spec on mobile.
http://www.glazman.org/weblog/dotclear/index.php?post/2012/02/09/CALL-FOR-ACTION%3A-THE-OPEN-WEB-NEEDS-YOU-NOW
http://www.webmonkey.com/2012/02/webkit-isnt-breaking-the-web-you-are/
Co-Chairmain of the web standards group:
http://www.glazman.org/weblog/dotclear/index.php?post/2012/02/09/CALL-FOR-ACTION%3A-THE-OPEN-WEB-NEEDS-YOU-NOW
Mozilla on the issue.
http://alistapart.com/article/the-vendor-prefix-predicament-alas-eric-meyer-interviews-tantek-celik
Nice work. I like how it all stays declarative in the CSS too.
I would recommend outsourcing your parsing though. It's a tough job and things like CSS hacks can really take your regexes for a loop.
I'd recommend trying out http://glazman.org/JSCSSP/ or https://github.com/nzakas/parser-lib/tree/master/src/css which Nicholas uses for CSSLint.
Quaxe looks like exactly that: http://www.glazman.org/weblog/dotclear/index.php?post/AnnouncingQuaxe
There was a big talk about it at WWX 2015 just a few days ago. Looks very promising.