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CSS

Posted by Jeff Busch
Jeff Busch
19,287 Points

CSS Vendor Prefixes?

Hi Treehouse, Guil Hernandez

I did a little search on The Net and came up empty. I'm trying to find out just what the vendor prefixes do, how they work. Putting a prefix before a css rule automatically makes a browser magically understand the rule? By this logic someone should be able to put -span- in front of a sentence and I will be able to read/understand Spanish. What is the mechanism here? How is this working?

Thanks, Jeff

3 Answers

oisin
oisin
5,286 Points

The browser uses its own prefix which renders its own version of that property which may differ slightly from other browsers. This is until the property becomes standardized across all browsers. It takes a long time to standardize properties so this enables people to use them before they are standardized...

The browser will ignore the property without the prefix until it becomes standardized.

Jeff Busch
Jeff Busch
19,287 Points

I think I'll try some Spanish now.

oisin
oisin
5,286 Points

haha, It would be nice if all browsers used the -span- prefix... then there would be just juan... no? ok, i'll let myself out :)

oisin
oisin
5,286 Points
oisin
oisin
5,286 Points

This is something I wanted to check myself but forgot about it so thank you for reminding me :)

Here's an article about it that I just found

" How it works: browser makers release builds containing non-standardized properties, prefixed. Testing in the wild uncovers issues and use cases which are fed back to the W3C, sometimes leading to refinements. Once the property is at Candidate Recommendation stage, browsers are supposed to support only the unprefixed property. "

So they are just used on new features which havn't yet been standardized by W3C

Jeff Busch
Jeff Busch
19,287 Points
Jeff Busch
Jeff Busch
19,287 Points

So what this is saying is that the browser itself has the ability to render the css property but without the prefix the browser will just ignore the property?