Re: Offline transcript

Marcos: I think actually what you wrote and what I wrote are in alignment as it relates to standards …

>> Further: My dislike of prefixing is to this point. I would prefer to write against a "standard" goal. Which would imply that I write my implementation against a "standard" API. While this means in prollyfill it wouldn't be a recognized standard by any standards body immediately it does mean that my implementation code is choosing it as "standard".
> 
> This is perverting the definition of a "standard". A standard has to be agreed upon by a set of entities (or it may be a de facto standard - if it is not ratified by any authority and has a large enough market share).  

I'm simply saying that as a dev I'd prefer to write against a "standard" - that being recognized by a body or being de facto. And I strongly believe that nExt Web will provide that confidence to devs. Which is to say that if it's the nExt Web prefix I can be comforted knowing it's a trusted prefix (and only 1). 

I've spent the last few days considering all this. I've always maintained that I understand/agree to prefixes, but have suspected/believed there could be an effort to avoid them. I'm on the side of prefixes now, but I will consistently push to make the fact of a prefix not create forward/backward compatibility (because I dislike this notion of implementation code that suits no purpose semantically or syntactically). 

And I totally agree with Marcos: Code is king here and I think there should be more efforts on that. 


On Dec 19, 2012, at 10:59 AM, Marcos Caceres <w3c@marcosc.com> wrote:

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> On Wednesday, December 19, 2012 at 5:45 PM, Clint Hill wrote:
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>> Further: My dislike of prefixing is to this point. I would prefer to write against a "standard" goal. Which would imply that I write my implementation against a "standard" API. While this means in prollyfill it wouldn't be a recognized standard by any standards body immediately it does mean that my implementation code is choosing it as "standard".
> 
> This is perverting the definition of a "standard". A standard has to be agreed upon by a set of entities (or it may be a de facto standard - if it is not ratified by any authority and has a large enough market share).  
> 
> For example, jQuery is not a standard, but it's definitely a de facto standard: most devs know what $() is as the know what <!doctype html> is (which is standard).
> 
> Anyway, lets not go too far down this rabbit hole.  
>> If I as an author don't care about standards in any way - I'm happy with prefixing. On the other hand if it's important to me than prefixing feels wrong.
> 
> Ok, so, you are making the assumption that all authors are good and will continue to maintain their code. I'm assuming authors get distracted or start working on other things … projects come and go. As such, I might not want unmaintained code overtaking native browser stuff (e.g., the prollyfill might have bugs and security issues). As a dev, I accept the risk when I choose to bind my application to some version of some prollyfill.
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> However, as I said before, if you can come up with some code/scheme that makes using a prollyfill safe, then I'm all ears.  
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> --  
> Marcos Caceres
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Received on Thursday, 20 December 2012 16:16:43 UTC