Re: Deciding in public (Was: SVGWG SVG-in-HTML proposal)

On Aug 1, 2008, at 14:50, Julian Reschke wrote:

> Ian Hickson wrote:
>> ...
>> Indeed, and <canvas>, another good example of why it is really bad  
>> for people to go and invent their own elements without working with  
>> the wider community. We're _still_ dealing with the problems Apple  
>> caused with <canvas>, for example the lack of a Path object, which  
>> we could have avoided if they had had wider peer review before  
>> shipping.
>> ...
>
> <canvas> was developed without distributed extensibility in the  
> language, wasn't it?

It was developed in a "distributed" (the one party away from others)  
manner as an extension. It was developed without a blessed framework  
for doing that kind of thing.

If there had been a blessed framework, would it have solved the lack  
of a Path object and the lack of a fallback mechanism from the start?

> What distributed extensibility gives us is disambiguation. But that  
> doesn't mean that things won't get peer review.

Would we be better off if <canvas> had its Apple origin unambiguosly  
on it for the rest of the existence of the Web? Would the Web platform  
be better if it were <apple:canvas xmlns:apple="http://www.apple.com/2004/07/namespaces/webkit/dashboard# 
"> instead of <canvas>?

> And yes, I talk from experience. For instance, WebDAV uses URI-based  
> extensibility all over the place, but most extensions I'm aware of  
> happen within the IETF process anyway.


What does the URI cruft buy WebDAV if it's mostly within the IETF  
anyway? Experimental CSS and JS API features seem to be doing fine  
without URIs and with simple prefixes without an indirection layer.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Friday, 1 August 2008 15:37:59 UTC