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Because the interface hasn't been defined yet. They're making experimental functions with no standard interface, so the prefix indicates it's not designed for production use yet. Look at CSS gradients, and even border-radius: until relatively recently, there were multiple different ways to achieve the same effect depending on the browser and that vendor's prefix: -moz-border-radius-topleft vs -webkit-border-top-left-radius (the latter won out and is now the standard, sans prefix) further complicated by non-circular radii; see http://www.css3.info/preview/rounded-border/. And that's dead-simple compared to gradients - look at the output to get something cross-browser here

This is definitely a real problem. Too bad the proposal doesn't actually solve it. While it goes in the right direction by asking for support of non-prefixed properties from day one, that effectively ensures that the first implementation out there defines the interface, which can easily leave a huge mess behind (again, see webkit's gradient interface). The proposal's author is aware of this and dismisses it as a non-issue, which is incredibly ignorant.

The big difference with CSS3 is that instead of one huge all-encompassing standard it's broken up into modules. Each module goes through the process independently of the others.
Two modules (colors and selectors) are currently Proposed Recommendations, with eight more being Candidate Recommendations.
http://www.css3.info/modules/

Hence the ratification process and vendor specific extensions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W3C_recommendation

http://www.css3.info/vendor-specific-extensions-to-css3/

thestudio_bob is correct.

Look at the source dipshit, the CSS3 extensions are in the Apple name space and they aren't anything more than proposals, they aren't near standards. They are the equivalent of ActiveX components in JavaScript.

Before you even try to call people names you could avoid portraying yourself as a complete retard (too late now though) by doing a quick visit to http://www.css3.info/modules/

Once there, do go down to 3D Transformations and you will notice it's a Working Draft.

You already showed you wont bother reading so let me explain what a working draft is (or just quote the site on it):

Working Draft (WD)

A Working Draft is a document that W3C has published for review by the community, including W3C Members, the public, and other technical organizations. Some, but not all, Working Drafts are meant to advance to Recommendation.

Finalized standard? No. But just like a wedding, unless you have some drunk guy stand up and object to the two soul-mates marriage, it's very likely it will end up in the final specification. This applies to most of the HTML5 definition, though.

Oh and for your amusement I did look through the code. I am no CSS expert but the only thing that resembled a namespace was labeled -webkit, not -apple. So it's not Apple's namespace, but the engine that happens to be co-developed by Apple, Google, KDE, Rim, Samsung and many others.

You may well be right. I hope you are. However, five years is an eternity in Internet time.

True. But I'm just talking about when Flash is practically extinct. It's already on the way down, and HTML5 is already close to an acceptable replacement for some basic use-cases. I'd bet on top-tier video sites switching to HTML5 by default on some platforms in less than two years (they already support HTML5 as an option). Obviously there will be no massive change in the next six months – that's only practical when the client and server are controlled by the same party.

To check your perspective, please try to identify any top tier web-based business today that is still using the same core technologies as it was five years ago.

I'm not familiar with many top-tier websites, but the one I am familiar with is Wikipedia. That still runs on MediaWiki on top of LAMP behind Squid, pretty much the same as five years ago, although with a number of fairly significant improvements across the board. Most of the others are so secretive that it's hard to say, unless the site actually didn't exist five years ago. Regardless, your general point is correct.

Actually, no CSS3 module has yet become a W3C Recommendation.

No, but they're still standardized. Standardization is just when the exact way to do something is written down in a central and agreed-upon place. Editor's Drafts are standards. You can even have standards that aren't written down in any special place at all, like rel="nofollow". You might call some of these de facto standards rather than proper "official" standards, but they're still standards. To reach W3C Recommendation, every single feature of a document (which is often very large) must have two independent implementations and often a full test suite. Most of the individual features may well have been standardized years before.

In any case, for real projects rather than exploratory or for-fun pages, it is what's implemented that counts. There's no rule that we can't change a project to use a better technology later if one is available, but it's pretty hard to run a successful project using a better technology that most users don't have yet.

Yep, sure. It's standardized, but as I said, it's not implemented. The distinction is important, since a lot of random Slashdotters seem to blame the W3C for slow standards progress. In fact, in core web technologies like CSS and HTML5, it's the implementers who are usually the bottleneck, since writing a spec is typically quicker than coding the feature.

Depends what you mean by "soon". I predict less than five years until...

You may well be right. I hope you are. However, five years is an eternity in Internet time. Some people become multimillionaires in less time. Other people try two or three different failed start-ups.

To check your perspective, please try to identify any top tier web-based business today that is still using the same core technologies as it was five years ago. For reference, in mid-2005, Firefox was a year old, Safari was on version 2, IE6 was still the latest release, and Chrome wasn't even a twinkle in Sergey's and Larry's eyes. Tim O'Reilly had just popularised the term "Web 2.0", and YouTube had only just been invented. Neither major server-side frameworks like Ruby on Rails and CodeIgniter nor major client-side frameworks like jQuery had been released yet, and cloud hosting platforms like AWS didn't exist (for the general public, at least).

Really? Give examples of this, please. In CSS you sometimes have to state the same exact rule three times or more, but it's the same rule with the same syntax in all common cases I can think of except gradients.

I suspect gradients are indeed the main obvious example where the syntax differs significantly between browsers. If we're talking more generally about features that don't have effective cross-browser support yet, obviously neither IE nor Opera support much CSS3 stuff in their latest versions. There are several more features like animations that are only supported to any useful extent in Webkit browsers, so there aren't enough competing implementations to allow for different versions of CSS in your file. :-)

In fact, this stuff is generally standardized already. The problem is it's not always implemented

Actually, no CSS3 module has yet become a W3C Recommendation.

In any case, for real projects rather than exploratory or for-fun pages, it is what's implemented that counts. There's no rule that we can't change a project to use a better technology later if one is available, but it's pretty hard to run a successful project using a better technology that most users don't have yet.

*Hand wave* This is not the CSS you're looking for

It sucks that the implementation is browser-specific, but hey! It's still there.

I really should have said HTML5 and CSS. CSS drop-down menus, transparency and the like also some great shadow and border features etc and even different developments in CSS animationwill hopefully replace flash and javascript.New HTML tags for embedding content or applications will go a long way to making flash redundant also. I hope.

CSS is used for easy and consistent page formatting across a site...

Well, yes that is ONE use for CSS, but please remember that it is Cascading Style Sheets. Style information can be embedded in the HTML itself, or in an external file. Style information in the page itself will be prioritized over CSS in an external document. This adds flexibility. HTML is about data. CSS is about presenting that data. Flash is doing what HTML and CSS should do and will soon.

They just sued.

No they didn't. They filed a Antitrust complaint, big difference.

http://www.css3.info/opera-files-antitrust-complaint-against-microsoft/

However, Opera have in the past threatened to sue Microsoft a but Microsoft settled before it ever reached court.

The background to the suit were that if you visited the MSN website with Opera identifying itself as Opera you got served a broken web page, this is what lead Opera to introduce the feature of identifying itself as other browsers. The reason for this change were that if visiting the very same site with the very same version of Opera but identifying as IE the page displayed correctly!

A fact that unfortunately is omitted in the below article, but I'm sure you are capable of doing the research yourself in the case you don't bellieve me.

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39155572,00.htm

I've got a coworker that is an IE fanatic. He keeps pointing out that IE uses less memory than FF, he's right. He also tallies up whenever I complain of a crash vs when he complains of one... and he's winning (as in fewer crashes).

I love being anti-m$, but you can't just dismiss their product as second-rate because you want it to be.

If firefox supported as little as IE, it would likely use much less memory. Is it not more appropriate to measure a browser by how well it supports the web standards that browsers are built to read? MS can't even be bothered to implement all of the standard html tags. IE 8 will finally support the frickin' <q> tag from HTML 4. That's a hard one too... replace the <q> tags with quote characters. It's rocket science really. No wonder it has taken MS more than a decade to support it. Next, run IE through a CSS support test page. Maybe give Acid3 a shot with it. Things aren't looking so pretty for IE, are they? Now try opening an XHTML page with it. Oh, sorry... IE is unable to read xhtml. It just downloads it to disk. It also doesn't support SVG, or MathML, or ruby. Firefox on the other hand, does.

Of course IE isn't second rate. It's not even good enough to qualify as third rate. I'm sure that's the primary reason MS is bleeding browser share at an accelerating rate.

The thing is with Opera being known for its standards compliance, I'd guess it has got there through continuous improvement and no just drinking kool aid like certain web(kit) rendering engnines. Personally i use firefox and am happy that minefield passes css3 test suites (well one anyway) before acid3 (that should come naturally when the standard is properly implemented). Ofc its a shame it still fails at css2.1

beta5 -> RC1 was just bug fixes, as far as i can tell. And while SunSpider does help indicate javascript performance, ACID3 is fairly pointless, testing for CSS & html compliance is more relevant:
http://www.css3.info/selectors-test/test.html
FF3b5 & FF3 RC1 are the same 36/43 7unsupported (373/578) though as they wont be fixed till FF4

Well, it looks like the year of many things:

2008: The year of the big airline merger
2008: The year of RSS
2008: The year of OpenID
2008: The year of layout engine - CSS3
2008: The year of principles
2008: The year of Palestine

And all along I thought it was the year of the rat...

It is much more important to be compliant with CSS than just passing the Acid2 test, and so I really don't pay much attention to this test at all. There are better test suites out there, for instance http://www.css3.info/selectors-test/test.html.

We need to pay less attention to passing any one test and more to standards compliance as a whole.

I just checked Opera 9.50 Alpha in this test: http://www.css3.info/selectors-test/ and I got the following result: "From the 43 selectors 43 have passed, 0 are buggy and 0 are unsupported (Passed 578 out of 578 tests)"

considering that Safari's KHTML-based rendering engine is more standards compliant than either Firefox or IE.

>They need to REALLY separate layout from content.
That be the general definition of CSS (for better or worse).

As for the rest, CSS3 requires none of said hackery. Of course, nobody's actually done it yet;
fucking W3C takes half a decade to decide something. And no, -moz-column-width etc. are not
acceptable. Who the hell thought it was a good idea to prefix standards to be as fucking
proprietary extensions? So you have to write -moz-column-width, -webkit-column-width, column-width
to cover current and future implementations.

You may appreciate this post: Kill IE6 to Let CSS3 Live.

How about a way of having content reflow from one column to another when a window is resized? Page layout programs have done this for 20+ years, so shouldn't it be possible for a web page and a browser today?

The CSS3 multi-column module was designed for exactly that purpose. It's available in experimental form in current Mozilla-based browsers (Firefox, Seamonkey, Camino, etc.), and according to that page, it's available in nightly builds of Webkit, which will eventually become a future version of Safari. (Since the spec isn't final, the rules use -moz and -webkit prefixes, so that if the spec changes they won't have to change the official rule's behavior.) No word from Opera, though there are reportedly a bunch of CSS3 features in store for the next major update, and of course, who knows how long before we'll see it in IE.

Remember: HTML for structure, CSS for layout.

I can only agree with this guy: http://www.css3.info/kill-ie6-to-let-css3-live.
 
If this is what it takes to kill IE6, bring it on.

1.) If developers wants the everyday non-savvy users to use Linux then as a professional web developer I shouldn't have to even think of messing with the console just to install a Firefox nightly build. I don't care how much power is in the console I'm not using it and regular computer users sure as hell aren't. Point: get a unified installer system setup. Hell OSX is based on Unix (just like Linux) and it has a "drag the icon from here to there" installer. Why doesn't Linux (ANY flavor of it for that matter) have something ANYTHING along those lines? 2.) Don't use the crappy AC97 onboard audio in place of my Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Platinum audio card... and then give me no GUI option to switch from the onboard (no-3D audio btw) audio device. 3.) Keys need to work include Win+D, CTRL+ESC, ALT+TAB, CTRL+ALT+DEL, among many others. Xandros gains credit in my eyes for at least saying, "Hey, we know since 99% of the frigin world is stuck on Windows we thought it'd be cool to let you use those same keyboard controls". 4.) Call your control panel a control panel, or at least use the words preferences, settings, or something exceptionally obvious instead of just plain "YAST". If I'm a non-savvy user YAST sounds like spyware. 5.) If you debate me don't use your family who have all been learning Linux ANYWAY and aren't considered the typical non-savvy computer user. 6.) Stop using virtual memory by force. Sure it's a safety belt to some degree such as with web servers but I have yet to see any program that say, "Oh crap, using the hard drive as memory, maybe I should say something". And don't give me the "Well it doesn't need to be in memory" crap argument because if it doesn't need to be in memory then DON'T FRIGIN LOAD IT. Kudos thought to Linux for running on really old hardware. 7.) Stop turning my hard drive in to swiss cheese. One drive one partition. 8.) Make Konqueror's GUI a little easier to use by allowing icons to be dragged instead of the extremely confusing separate CAGE layout where I can't move an icon all the way to one side because it's locked up on another. Firefox's GUI has the potential to be good (it's default settings just aren't any good for the non-savvy). Kudos though for it doing pretty good on the CSS3 selectors test... http://www.css3.info/selectors-test/ Don't get me wrong, Linux is great and all but for as long as it's been around you'd think someone would have fixed these problems by now. I'm sticking with XP for now though for now I give Xandros the most credit thus far. Hey, at least they have made an honest attempt with their Windows EXE installer even though it did not work with a Firefox nightly build, kudos for making it to begin with.