WebKit CSS gradient syntax was pretty explicitly overridden by the standards process in favor of a better one. Thankfully, WebKit changed its syntax to match.
Note that in a world where the Web was defined as "whatever WebKit renders", which lots of HN readers seem to be in favor of these days, we would of course be stuck with the old gradient syntax forever.
Do you trust the standardization process to make good choices? We got the stupid now-standard CSS box model over IE's sensible one (and now, twelve years(?) later, there's finally an experimental way to use the sane definition of the width of an item). We got IE's <object> with its clsid nonsense over netscape's <embed>. We got the wrong choice for iframes as well. I'm happy to believe the new gradient syntax is better (though if it's really that much better, surely webkit could have changed it themselves), but taken as a whole I'd sooner trust webkit's decision-making than the W3C's.
Note that in a world where the Web was defined as "whatever WebKit renders", which lots of HN readers seem to be in favor of these days, we would of course be stuck with the old gradient syntax forever.