Dean pointed out that Apple’s Webkit team is finally adding Internet Explorer’s CSS Visual Filters (invented back in 1998 with Internet Explorer 4), and are calling it CSS Masks in Safari.
The sad news is that nobody’s giving the IE team due credit. The good news is that that power is now there.
So hooray Safari for ignoring web standards! Yes, I mean that. I’ll take a good de-facto standard over nothing any day (anyone remember when the W3C actually did stuff?) Step up to the plate, Opera, Mozilla, and Konqueror!
While you’re at it, don’t forget to grab IE’s other great dev features, too! If we get DHTML Behaviors, Databinding, CSS Expressions, Conditional Comments, and Deferred Scripts, that will cover my 2005 Dev Wishlist for Other Browsers.
That done, MS-haters could complain less about proprietary/innovation and the the web could keep moving forward. To be clear, I’m saying the effort to complain about IE’s extras would be better spent copying them in other browsers, helping web developers and by extension users.
Hooray for progress!