Re: New browser engines - what does that mean for our work on web audio / web midi

On the question of prefixes: I don't think this changes much of anything in
the immediate term (other than "we won't have the prefix problem in the
future, because we won't use prefixes" - e.g. we would never add a method
named webkitGetMIDIAccess()).

On the implementation question: I will of course leave any commentary on
Web Audio to Chris Rogers; for Web MIDI:

   1. our new process for Blink features makes it clear what the bar is to
   add new features to the web
platform<http://www.chromium.org/blink#new-features>.
    This is great, in my opinion, because it clarifies our mission (building
   on open standards) and defines how features are classified as "open
   standards".  This does mean, of course, that in order to get Web MIDI
   supported in Blink, it will need to meet those criteria, which include both
   other engines' support (philosophical or implementation) for a feature and
   web developer support for it, as well as spec stability.  These criteria
   are captured on http://chromestatus.com/, and reviewed in the weekly API
   reviews (Web MIDI will be reviewed in one of these meetings).
   2. I would say that I would not expect the Chromium team's work to
   result directly in MIDI support being added to WebKit.  I will of course
   advocate adding Web MIDI support in the future to WebKit, and if any Web
   MIDI code the Chromium team might produce would be useful, of course it
   could be contributed; however, the API is really a pretty slender layer on
   top of CoreMIDI, and the process model differences would likely mean there
   isn't a whole lot in common.

-Chris



On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 6:38 AM, Ehsan Akhgari <ehsan.akhgari@gmail.com>wrote:

> Servo is a research browser engine which currently supports just enough of
> web specs to render the most basic pages.  To the best of my knowledge
> there is currently no audio support in Servo so it currently will not
> affect our efforts here much.
>
> Blink is a fork of WebKit so I assume is going to inherit the current
> WebKit's Web Audio implementation, but given that Google will no longer
> contribute directly to WebKit, it means that further changes to the spec
> should now be implemented by three different browser engines as opposed to
> two, which is great news as far as I'm concerned, as that helps us find
> implementation issues faster.
>
> On the question of prefixes it seems like Blink is not going to drop any
> of the existing prefixes so for Web Audio it doesn't seem like anything
> would change.  For Web MIDI, it seems like Blink will not ship a prefixed
> implementation before it matches their new features criteria, which again
> is great news in that we will hopefully be able to avoid a lot of the
> current problems caused by WebKit shipping a prefixed implementation.
>
> Cheers,
>
> --
> Ehsan
> <http://ehsanakhgari.org/>
>
>
> On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 7:47 AM, Olivier Thereaux <
> Olivier.Thereaux@bbc.co.uk> wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> The past two days have been rich in announcements, notably the unveiling
>> of work on both the Servo [1][2] and Blink [3] browser engines.
>>
>> [1] https://github.com/mozilla/servo
>> [2]
>> https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2013/04/03/mozilla-and-samsung-collaborate-on-next-generation-web-browser-engine/
>> [3] http://www.chromium.org/blink
>>
>> Is it too early to ask out loud what implications these will have on our
>> work? I am assuming that it will mean that we will go from having two
>> distinct implementations (modulo a few different ports) to having (at
>> least) three.
>>
>> Things I am wondering:
>> * How does this affect our current discussion on vendor prefixes?
>> * How does this affect the development of the webkit implementation of
>> web audio and web midi?
>> * How does this affect the current development of web audio on gecko?
>>
>> I understand this is a public mailing-list where some things can't be
>> shared yet, and of course not all questions have answers yet. But it would
>> be interesting to hear what members of the group can share of their
>> understanding of the situation.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> --
>> Olivier
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>