Re: on execCommand() and script-triggered copy/cut/paste

On Wed, Aug 5, 2015 at 1:31 PM, Frederico Knabben <f.knabben@cksource.com>
wrote:

> On Wednesday 5 August 2015 at 13:13, Johannes Wilm wrote:
>
> I agree that neither of those should ever show up in an official W3C
> recommendation.
>
> But at the same time, the way the W3C draft system is beign used by the
> browser makers is that they already go ahead and implement some early
> editor draft specs whereas other aren't.
>
> Consequently, editor drafts are oftentimes recognizes as being
> authoritative. So just having an editor's draft of an execCommand spec out
> there is oftentimes regarded as a sign that execCommand is still alive by
> other spec editors, who may then go ahead and write more things on top of
> execCommand and even be implemented in browsers.
>
> This is what happened here: Aryeh's draft was out there, then our version.
> The clipboard api people saw that and assumed it was a good idea to
> continue building on top of execCommand. Hallvord and me had actually be in
> contact with over the last few months and had done rough readings of
> oneanother's specs, but because there was no fat sign on the execCommand
> draft saying "please don't build more stuff on top of this" we only very
> recently discovered that he assumed doing those things via execCommand as
> the only option would be enough, whereas we assumed that execCommand was to
> go away.
>
>
> So my conclusion: You are probably right that we cannot technically
> speaking deprecate something that never existed in an official
> recommendation. At the same time, we need a wording that goes further than
> "we don't have time to work on this right now". It should instead
> communicate something like: "execCommand is considered harmful. Please do
> not build more things on top of this without discussing it with the editing
> taskforce first.".
>
> I understand your point but, at the same time, I find if very strange that
> when an WD is in place it cannot accept deletions. You say that the only
> possibilities we have is either adding more to it or deprecating itself (!).
>

You mean deletions of individual points in those WDs or of the WD itself?

The problem with removing individual points is that some people feel very
passionate about execCommand (see comments here:
https://github.com/w3c/clipboard-apis/issues/16 ).

The problem with removing the entire file is that people will go ahead and
find old drafts somewhere on the internet and think that is the current
draft. This is now the second time that I found someone had been looking at
Aryeh's last draft and thought that we were working on that version of the
draft.


>
> I feel that removing things from WD happened already and is an acceptable
> practice. At least it should be because I would be extremely disappointed
> on ending up with an official recommendation that pointlessly specs
> deprecated things :/
>
> Maybe others can bring their experienced opinion as well.
>



-- 
Johannes Wilm
Fidus Writer
http://www.fiduswriter.org