Re: Bug 11239

On Thu, 28 Apr 2011, Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 10:07 PM, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
> >>    2. The UA cannot provide a blink rate (for whatever reason). When
> >>      drawing a canvas caret, the author wants to draw a caret with 
> >>     a   default blink rate (apparently this is usually 500ms).
> >
> > What scenario could there be? If there is no concrete scenario where 
> > this happens, then there's no point discussing it.
> 
> I can /imagine/ a concrete scenario. Does that count?
> 
> What if a visual-rendering UA delegated drawing of widgets (e.g. 
> textareas) to the system and the system did not provide information 
> about caret blink rate back? Then the author would want to draw a caret, 
> but the UA would be unable to provide the correct blink rate to use.

What platform is like this?


On Thu, 28 Apr 2011, Jonas Sicking wrote:
> 
> For what it's worth. I don't see that we'd implement this function at
> all in firefox. For a few reasons:
> 
> 1. I don't want people to write text editors using canvas. They are
> bound to get a lot of things resulting in worse user experience for
> users. *Especially* for users that use AT.
> 2. It's not worth the engineering time needed. Weeding through the
> various platform APIs on which firefox runs to try to get at this
> information is non-trivial. The time could be spent on features that
> help users more.
> 3. It's in fact actively harmful for users since it increases
> fingerprintability. We're going through great pains to reduce
> fingerprintability, adding features that go the other way is not
> something we'd take lightly.
> 
> So I'd prefer that the feature was just removed. If it isn't, and we
> for some reason decide that we want to claim to implement this
> function (such as it appearing in a high-profile test suite), we'd
> likely just make it return 500ms.

Agreed, I think this is a terrible feature. I'm trying to apply the 
decision the chairs made, however.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'