Re: <keygen> element

On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 4:56 AM, Ian Hickson<ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
> On Tue, 1 Sep 2009, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>> On Sep 1, 2009, at 3:34 PM, Jonas Sicking wrote:
>> >
>> > One thing we could do is to add a note that this feature is known to
>> > be bad and is intended to be deprecated as soon as alternative
>> > proposals arise. That would give any UA a pretty good story for not
>> > implementing the feature for now.
>
> Pretty much everything in the spec will be obsoleted when better solutions
> arise. Why would we single out <keygen> here? Do we have reason to believe
> that new solutions will arrive any time soon? (I'm not aware of any
> working group working on an alternative API that any browser vendors are
> interested in implementing.)

One reason is that there seems to be universal agreement that the
feature should be deprecated and removed from the platform as soon as
possible. I would probably in fact recommend to authors to avoid the
feature if at all possible to avoid problems in the likely event that
the element is removed from future browsers.

> On Wed, 2 Sep 2009, Adrian Bateman wrote:
>>
>> [keygen] should be documented but not in HTML5 itself - the HTML5 spec
>> supports loading unknown elements that are defined elsewhere. Since it
>> wasn't included in previous versions of HTML and the desire is not to
>> include it in future versions, not adding it at this stage seems
>> preferable.
>
> It's part of the HTML language at this point, whether we like it or not --
> and it seems sensible to me to define the HTML language in the HTML spec.

Maybe this would be incentive for Microsoft to come up with a proposal
so that we could mark the feature deprecated in HTML5 even! ;)

/ Jonas

Received on Friday, 4 September 2009 11:35:14 UTC