W3C gives blessing on CSS animations without prefixes

The CSS working group at W3C, which develops CSS standards, gives the go-ahead to use CSS3 Transforms, Transitions, and Animations without vendor prefixes.

Vendor prefixes in CSS are designed to enable developers to use properties that are at the proposed recommendation stage before they are finally accepted. Thanks to the prefixes, developers can use many of the quirks of the proposed standards in specific browsers. Unfortunately, such projects do not always end well. Vendor prefixes became a real problem after Opera went so far that they were going to introduce support for prefixes of other browsers .
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Therefore, the message that at once three CSS properties lose their prefixes is very good news for developers. Of course, it is still too early to edit the code and delete the prefixes, but soon the browser developers will release updates with support for these properties without prefixes. In fact, the latest version of IE10 Release Preview already understands CSS3 Transforms, Transitions and Animations without prefixes.

IEBlog recently published a good overview of all CSS properties currently working without prefixes in IE10.

Unfortunately, as is often the case in web development, using prefix-free CSS properties is not always as easy as it should be. Even those who adhere to the best practice of writing properties with prefixes, writing the same property without a prefix at the end, will in some cases have to tweak their code a bit.

Consider CSS gradient syntax. Prefixed gradients currently supported by browsers are in fact an outdated draft version of the gradient specification. A variant of this syntax does not comply with this specification being at the stage of a possible recommendation . This means that if you recorded a gradient without the CSS prefix in accordance with the outdated specification, then when the gradients finally standardize and remove the prefixes, your code will not work. Fortunately, CSS gradients are something like an anomaly and in most cases you won't have to edit a lot of code. In Transforms, Transitions, and Animations, you don’t need to change anything at all.

Perhaps browser developers will have to leave support for properties with prefixes even after the W3C standardizes these properties.