Re: Strawman Promises consensus position, based on Thursday's telechat

On 10/6/14, 10:52 AM, Chris Wilson wrote:
> I support moving to Promises sooner rather than later.
>
> To be fair, though, just claiming "people are using the prefixed 
> variant" isn't totally representative - all they need is 
> "navigator.getUserMedia = navigator.getUserMedia || 
> navigator.webkitGetUserMedia || navigator.mozGetUserMedia;" somewhere 
> in their JS, and they can act as if it's unprefixed.

I agree that people ||'ing like this pretty much negates any technical 
value of prefixing. Ironically, in reverse order it would have had 
merit. E.g.

   navigator.getUserMedia = navigator.webkitGetUserMedia || 
navigator.mozGetUserMedia || navigator.getUserMedia;

would have actually guaranteed compatibility for a script for much 
longer (as long as browsers supported a prefixed version, and would have 
given browsers the option to keep such users working the old way).

So I fully agree that prefixes offer nothing technically, but they have 
important psychological value since people are aware they are building 
on a changing foundation, and have implicitly "signed on" and hopefully 
budgeted in time to correct their code when the final API becomes 
available. I.e. there would be no surprises *if* there was rug-pulling, 
as it would have been on people with sea legs. In spite of this we're 
*not* pulling any rugs.

>   The Promises changeover will be a bit more impactful.

Luckily changes here are solely in APIs not implemented yet 
(mediaDevices and mediaStreamTrack), so any changeover to promises in 
existing code is entirely voluntary until we start adding deprecation 
warnings to old navigator.getUserMedia, which the strawman proposal 
argues shouldn't happen for two years. I think that's more than lenient. 
Too lenient in fact, and a mistake, but I've said I'm willing to live 
with it in the interest of moving forward, so there we go.

.: Jan-Ivar :.

Received on Monday, 6 October 2014 20:10:46 UTC