Why do mozilla and webkit prepend -moz- and -webkit- to CSS3 rules?

Posted by egarcia on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by egarcia
Published on 2010-05-28T17:01:30Z Indexed on 2010/05/28 17:12 UTC
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CSS3 rules bring lots of interesting features.

Take border-radius, for example. The standard says that if you write this rule:

div.rounded-corners {
  border-radius: 5px;
}

I should get a 5px border radius.

But neither mozilla nor webkit implement this. However, they implement the same thing, with the same parameters, with a different name (-moz-border-radius and -webkit-border-radius, respectively).

In order to satisfy as many browsers as possible, you end up with this:

div.rounded-corners {
  border-radius: 5px;
  -moz-border-radius: 5px;
  -webkit-border-radius: 5px;
}

I can see two obvious disadvantages:

  • Copy-paste code. This has obvious risks that I will not discuss here.
  • The W3C CSS validator will not validate these rules.

At the same time, I don't see any obvious advantages.

I believe that the people behind mozilla and webkit are more intelligent than myself. There must be some good reasons to have things structured this way. It's just that I can't see them.

So, I must ask you people: why is this?

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