Sep
Angles in gradients subject to change
Vendor prefixes have always been the subject of heated debates among web developers and designers. And although it’s easy to forget, a prefix basically means: this stuff is not finished, and might change in the future – use at you own peril.
A prime example of this recently cropped up concerning angles in CSS gradients. A few months back Fantasai posed a simple question to the web community: do you prefer the current way of defining angles (0 is east, continue counter-clockwise) or should we adapt a system of bearing angles, where 0 is north and we move clockwise? The response largely pointed in the direction of the latter option, and recent versions of the spec now read like this:
0deg points upwards, 90deg points toward the right, and positive angles go clockwise
It’s great to see that the people writing the specs actively listen to feedback from the community, but this means that browsers will have to implement this backwards-incompatible change sooner or later. So yes, CSS gradients defined with angles will more or less break when this happens. Let’s hope this shift will happen swiftly and well coordinated.
