Re: Conflicts between W3C specs and ES5?

On Mon, 16 Nov 2009 16:56:14 +0100, Brendan Eich <brendan@mozilla.org>  
wrote:
> On Nov 16, 2009, at 7:51 AM, Anne van Kesteren wrote:
>> Opera has similar evangelism efforts and I'm sure other browser teams  
>> do too (at the very least Microsoft does). At some point you just reach  
>> the point where spending some time on defining trailing edge stuff  
>> outweighs the cost of trying to evangelize each site that uses it.
>
> At some point *you* do. So do we, but less so since gaining more market  
> share starting with Firefox 1 in 2004. Back in 2001 we would either do  
> what we had to, or wave the standards flag and hang tough at  
> small-percentage market share numbers.

We're talking about features here that Gecko/WebKit/Presto/Trident have in  
common. If you can remove them I'm sure that might make it more realistic  
for us to consider removing it too rather than figuring out how you  
implemented it. :-)


> Market dynamics and content evolution mean that the trailing edge trails  
> off -- the '90s web does not entirely render compatibly in an HTML5 UA.  
> We should not over-bias for the past, or we will paint ourselves  
> (slowly) into corners.

I'm not really convinced it takes that much time in general and e.g. with  
ECMAScript date parsing I really think it ought to be defined properly. It  
was also said that defining an HTML parser would be a bad idea for similar  
reasons, but I think it turned out as something really great and useful.  
There may very well be a trade-off, but I have not encountered that point  
yet personally.


-- 
Anne van Kesteren
http://annevankesteren.nl/

Received on Monday, 16 November 2009 16:08:48 UTC