Why isn't it possible to combine vendor-specific pseudo-elements/classes into one rule set?

Question

In CSS it is possible to style placeholder text within an input using a combination of vendor-specific pseudo-classes and pseudo-elements (to get the best cross

Answer 1

CSS2.1 states:

The selector (see also the section on selectors) consists of everything up to (but not including) the first left curly brace ({). A selector always goes together with a declaration block. When a user agent cannot parse the selector (i.e., it is not valid CSS 2.1), it must ignore the selector and the following declaration block (if any) as well.

Note that since CSS2.1 pre-dates CSS3, "it is not valid CSS 2.1" is written under the assumptions that a user agent is fully CSS2.1-compliant and that CSS3 does not exist in theory. In practice, wherever the spec says "it is not valid CSS" or something to that effect, it should be taken to mean "it is not understood by the user agent". See my answer to this related question for a more in-depth explanation.

Namely, since one vendor's browser doesn't understand other vendors' prefixes, it has to drop any rules that contain those unrecognized prefixes in pseudo-class and pseudo-element selectors.¹

For some insight as to why such a rule was put in place, see this answer.

---

¹ _{Note that WebKit is notorious for partially flouting this rule: it has no trouble parsing rules whose selectors have unrecognized prefixed pseudo-elements (which in this case is ::-moz-placeholder). That said, the :-moz-placeholder pseudo-class in your combined rule will cause it to break anyway.}