W3C gives blessing on CSS animations without prefixes

Original author: Scott Gilbertson
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The CSS team at W3C, which is dedicated to creating CSS standards, gives the green light to using CSS3 Transforms, Transitions, and Animations without vendor prefixes.

CSS vendor prefixes are designed to enable developers to use properties that are at the stage of a proposed recommendation before they are finally accepted. Thanks to prefixes, developers can use many of the quirks of the proposed standards in specific browsers. Unfortunately, such undertakings do not always end well. Vendor prefixes became a real problem after Opera went so far as to get support for prefixes from other browsers .

Therefore, the message that immediately three CSS properties are deprived of prefixes is very good news for developers. Of course, it’s too early to edit the code and remove prefixes, but browser developers will soon release updates that support these properties without prefixes. In fact, the latest version of IE10 Release Preview already understands CSS3 Transforms, Transitions and Animations without prefixes.

IEBlog recently published a good overview of all CSS properties that currently work without prefixes in IE10.

Unfortunately, as is often the case in web development, using prefix-free CSS properties is not always as easy as it should be. Even those who adhere to the best practice of writing properties with prefixes, writing the same property at the end without a prefix, in some cases will need to slightly tweak their code.

Consider the syntax of CSS gradients. Prefix gradients currently supported by browsers are actually an outdated draft version of the gradient specification. A variant of this syntax does not conform to this specification, which is at the stage of a possible recommendation.. This means that if you wrote down the gradient without the CSS prefix in accordance with the outdated specification, then when the gradients finally standardize and deprive the prefixes, your code will not work. Fortunately, CSS gradients are a bit of an anomaly and in most cases you don't have to edit a lot of code. In Transforms, Transitions, and Animations, you don’t need to change anything at all.

Browser developers may have to leave support for prefixed properties even after the W3C standardizes these properties.

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