Re: [XHR] responseType "json"

On 1/6/12 12:13 PM, Jarred Nicholls wrote:
> WebKit is used in many walled garden environments, so we consider these
> scenarios, but as a secondary goal to our primary goal of being a
> standards compliant browser engine.  The point being, there will always
> be content that's created solely for WebKit, so that's not a good
> argument to make.  So generally speaking, if someone is aiming to create
> content that's x-browser compatible, they'll do just that and use the
> least common denominators.

People never aim to create content that's cross-browser compatible per 
se, with a tiny minority of exceptions.

People aim to create content that reaches users.

What that means is that right now people are busy authoring webkit-only 
websites on the open web because they think that webkit is the only UA 
that will ever matter on mobile.  And if you point out this assumption 
to these people, they will tell you right to your face that it's a 
perfectly justified assumption.  The problem is bad enough that both 
Trident and Gecko have seriously considered implementing support for 
some subset of -webkit CSS properties.  Note that "people" here includes 
divisions of Google.

As a result, any time WebKit deviates from standards, that _will_ 100% 
guaranteed cause sites to be created that depend on those deviations; 
the other UAs then have the choice of not working on those sites or 
duplicating the deviations.

We've seen all this before, circa 2001 or so.

Maybe in this particular case it doesn't matter, and maybe the spec in 
this case should just change, but if so, please argue for that, as the 
rest of your mail does, not for the principle of shipping random spec 
violations just because you want to.   In general if WebKit wants to do 
special webkitty things in walled gardens that's fine.  Don't pollute 
the web with them if it can be avoided.  Same thing applies to other 
UAs, obviously.

-Boris

Received on Friday, 6 January 2012 20:19:29 UTC