[webkit-dev] Unprefixed and prefixed DOM events.

[Alexis Menard]

Hi all,

As you know I'm working on unprefixing CSS transitions and I need a
few advice from the DOM experts.

Problem : CSS Transitions when they finish to animate send a DOM event
"transitionend" as specified there [1] to give the developer a notice
that the transition finished. Today WebKit sends the prefixed
counterpart "webkitTransitionEnd". Animations also have the same event
and few more. So today the problem is when we should send the prefixed
event and when we should send the unprefixed one, and if we should
send both.

I think that sending both events will break content somewhere as JS
functions attached with addEventListener will be called two times.

Sending only the unprefixed event will break WebKit-only content the
day we ship CSS Transitions unprefixed. I know they should not produce
WebKit only code but it's not the point of the discussion.

A solution is to send the prefixed or the unprefixed event depending
if someone is listening to it or not. Let me explain.

Let say there is a listener on the prefixed event only then we deliver
the prefixed event *only*.

If there is a listener on the unprefixed event only we deliver the
unprefixed event *only*.

If there are listeners on both events then we send the unprefixed one
*only* forcing people to rely on the unprefixed.

It seems that this approach is an elegant one and allows us to remove
later in the future the support for prefixed transitions (including
the events). As a side note Opera is acting the same as the proposed
solution.

Now obviously prefixed and unprefixed events in the DOM is something
new because it never happens in the past so we don't have support for
having such a mechanism for event delivery.

I thought that we could somewhere in the Animation/Transition code be
smart and try to figure which event to send but it practically
impossible to access the EventListenerMap so I thought we could
support it somehow generically in the DOM events code. It will be
useful for the animations and maybe in the future (we're not really
sure if prefixed event will again show but who knows).

So I did a first patch there [2] and I would like to gather feedback
whether the approach is correct (I don't know much the DOM related
code) or if somebody has a better idea on how to resolve the problem.
Also if I have missed something, please point it to me. The patch
doesn't include the support for HTML ontransitionend attribute which I
prefer to do in a later patch.

Thanks.

[1] http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-transitions/#transition-shorthand-property
[2] https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=105647
-- 
Software Engineer @
Intel Open Source Technology Center