[Bug 25618] Extensibility: Offer spec-blessed ways to extend the algorithms and curves, rather than monkey-patching the spec

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=25618

--- Comment #33 from Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky@mit.edu> ---
The disagreement seems to be simple to me, but I welcome corrections if I
misstate someone's position.  It goes as follows:

Say we have a base spec S1 and an extension S2.

The fundamental question is whether it's useful to ship a browser that supports
S1 but not S2, or whether in practice anyone implementing S1 will also need to
implement S2.

Brian's position seems to be that he wants the freedom to ship S1 but not S2,
which implicitly suggests that he doesn't think support for S1 will necessarily
require supporting S2.

Anne and Ryan's position seems to be that in practice anyone shipping S1 will
also be forced to ship S2, so we do implementors of S1 a disservice by
pretending in S1 that S2 does not exist: they end up discovering the hard way,
via bug reports about stuff being broken, that S2 does in fact exist and needs
to be implemented.

The history of web specs suggests to me that Anne and Ryan are right, for what
it's worth, assuming that S2 is implemented by anyone at all....  but in the
end this really depends on what exactly S2 is.  For example, if S2 is not meant
to be implemented by browsers to start with, then it doesn't matter all that
much whether it's explicitly pointed to from S1 or not.

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Received on Thursday, 9 October 2014 15:08:09 UTC