Microsoft Complains That WebKit Breaks Web Standards

Billly Gates writes "In a bizarre, yet funny and ironic move, Microsoft warned web developers that using WebKit stagnates open standards and innovation on the Web. According to the call to action in its Windows Phone Developer Blog, Microsoft is especially concerned about the mobile market, where many mobile sites only work with Android or iOS with WebKit-specific extensions. Their examples include W3C code such as radius-border, which is being written as -WebKit-radius-border instead on websites. In the mobile market WebKit has a 90% marketshare, while website masters feel it is not worth the development effort to test against browsers such as IE. Microsoft's solution to the problem of course is to use IE 10 for standard compliance and not use the proprietary (yet open source) WebKit."

Comments

Re:Microsoft is right

[nahdude812]

And nothing says that Microsoft can't translate -webkit- specific prefixes in a compatible manner. Just because it's -webkit-something doesn't mean only Webkit is allowed to use it, but rather that it should be compatible with the Webkit implementation.

A lot of these -webkit- prefixes exist because these are CSS 2 or CSS 3 properties that predated finalization of these standards, and most of them are largely compatible with the final standard if the prefix is removed. Webkit was complying with standards by adding features not yet finalized and prefixing them so there would be no conflict with the final standard. MS is essentially upset that Webkit's presence is sufficiently strong that developers for the first time in many years, don't feel the need to test against Microsoft's platform.