It seemed like an excellent idea to some Microsoft developers (to get a brief second): Why not add support for both the -ms and -webkit prefixes within the edition of the internet Explorer (IE) cellular browser Microsoft was constructing for Windows Phone 7 gadgets?It turns out the notion was a poor 1. And it took Microsoft just one day to alter its route, as documented in two back-to-back weblog posts on the “IE for Windows Telephone Team” weblog.A quick bit of background: Webkit is the rendering engine at the heart of a number of browsers,
Microsoft Office 2007 Key, including those from Apple, Google, Nokia and RIM, among others. Microsoft uses its own rendering engine, known as Trident, inside Web Explorer. When browser developers implement an experimental or proprietary CSS property, they prefix it with the appropriate “vendor prefix.”On May 10, in a post entitled “JavaScript and CSS changes in IE Cellular for Windows Telephone 7,” Windows Telephone Principal Program Manager Joe Marini explained Microsoft;s plans for adding two prefixes to the edition of IE (a hybrid of IE 7 and 8) that it is constructing for Windows Telephone 7.Community reaction was unfavorable (to put it mildly) about Microsoft;s decision to add the -webkit prefix. Daniel Glazman, the co-chairman of the W3cCSS Working Group weighed in with the following comment (at the end of the original Microsoft weblog post):“Let me state it very clearly: vendor prefixes are here for experimental purposes by the vendor represented in the prefix. I __strongly__ recommend removing *immediately* that -webkit-* property from Mobile IE.”On May 11, the IE for Windows Phone Team did a 180. As explained in a new weblog post by Marini:“Our original intent in adding assistance for this WebKit-specific property was to make Internet developers’ lives a bit easier by not having to add yet another vendor-prefixed CSS property to their pages to control how text was scaled. Even more specifically, we intuited that the most common use case for this property was to explicitly set it to ‘none; in order to tell the browser not to scale a particular section of text….“After hearing the community’s feedback on this issue (and a couple of face-palms when we realized the broader implications of implementing other browser vendors’ CSS properties), we’ve decided that it’s best to only implement the -ms- prefixed version and not the -webkit- 1.”Microsoft is putting the finishing touches about the operating system that will power Windows Phone seven units. A near-final escrow build of the release candidate of the Windows Phone 7 OS leaked recently. Microsoft officials have declined to say when the company expects to release to manufacturing that operating system, but the first Windows Telephone seven gadgets are due out by this holiday season.