Re: Meeting input

On Tue, Aug 11, 2015 at 11:35 AM, Hallvord Reiar Michaelsen Steen
<hsteen@mozilla.com> wrote:
> You have some "deprecate or spec" decisions to make - I hope you keep in
> mind that removing features from the web is very, very hard and will take a
> long time, and just having a new spec (even if you suceed in getting it past
> the hurdles to become a W3C Recommendation) won't guarantee either
> implementation or uptake among developers. Also, it's likely we're still a
> couple of years away from having widespread implementation support for your
> new features and meanwhile many new projects will be built on the old stuff.
> Telling developers to not use cE=true during the next few years is
> impractical.

On reflection, I agree that referring to the entire feature as
obsolete is premature.  I'm currently typing this e-mail in a
contenteditable div on Gmail.  If contenteditable were really obsolete
today, they probably wouldn't do that.  Perhaps a warning that there
is no browser interoperability and no realistic prospect of it, and
spec writers are working on an alternative feature set to replace
contenteditable.  But in practice, contenteditable=true will still be
needed for a few years at least -- probably much longer, to account
for old browsers.  So I think calling it obsolete or telling authors
not to use it is misleading.

execCommand() could probably be considered obsolete, however, except
for a couple of features that aren't available otherwise.

> For this reason, I suggest that you add a warning - let's call it "intent to
> deprecate" - to the older specs, but still keep them in a sort of
> low-resource maintenance mode. If some UA developer happens to be working on
> something and notices an error in those specs, it should be fixed if it's
> easy to do so.

Why?  None of the browsers implement the specs, nor do they
realistically intend to.

On Tue, Aug 11, 2015 at 12:45 PM, Johannes Wilm <mail@johanneswilm.org> wrote:
> This effort was initially led by browser people and we JS people were told
> that it would be impossible to fix cE=true. Now you, as a representative of
> another browser, seem to be telling us the opposite. That seems a little
> surprising, so I guess we'll just have to see what happens.

The correct one to ask about editing stuff at Mozilla is Ehsan, who is
the owner of the editor module.  He basically makes all the
editing-related decisions himself.  If it would help, I could ask him
for a position statement.  (Or anyone else could, of course.)

Received on Tuesday, 11 August 2015 10:55:25 UTC