- From: Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc>
- Date: Wed, 8 Jul 2009 11:36:41 -0700
- To: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Cc: Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de>, Robin Berjon <robin@berjon.com>, Shelley Powers <shelley.just@gmail.com>, "public-html@w3.org" <public-html@w3.org>
On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 1:13 AM, Ian Hickson<ian@hixie.ch> wrote: > On Wed, 8 Jul 2009, Julian Reschke wrote: >> Ian Hickson wrote: >> > ... Specification authors -- the W3C, the IETF, the WHATWG, you, me -- >> > have _zero power_ to enforce implementors to do what we put in our >> > specs. We only get what we write to be implemented if what we write is >> > what implementors are willing to implement. (This is why I work so >> > closely with browser vendors and other implementors to find out what >> > they want.) ... >> >> That makes it sound as if implementors never ever implement things they >> don't want to implement. This may be true for browser implementors, but >> certainly is not true in general. > > I think it's true in any market where deployment happens regardless of > conformance. I don't know about other browser, but I definitely haven't found it true for gecko/firefox. We have at several times added support for features that we don't want to add, simply because the alternative has been worse. For example: * Added support for nodeIterator in order to be complient with ACID3 as well as the traverse spec. I don't think it's a useful feature (TreeWalker covers the needed usecases IMHO), but it wasn't worth the hassle of trying to get it removed from the spec. It was deemed more important to be complient with the spec in order for authors to be able to rely on it. * SVG. While many of us thought, and still think, that SVG is overly complicated and not integrated enough with HTML, it was deemed more important to have support for some vector format than to have that vector format be better than SVG is. * P3P. Back in the netscape days P3P support was added out of pressure from the community and government. Only once it was clear that P3P was unsuccessful and pressure to implement it disappeared, was support removed. / Jonas
Received on Wednesday, 8 July 2009 18:37:40 UTC