Re: Offline transcript

"prefixing is the worst form of compatibility protection, except for all
the others"

Sorry for resurrecting this discussion, I was away from email for a couple
of weeks.

I don't like prefixing but I am swayed by Brian's arguments and think that
it is the only *practical* option.

However, I'm not sure I like "x-" as a prefix. "x-" in my mind says
"custom", i.e. not standard at all. I would propose that nExt Web forward
polyfills use a named prefix, perhaps "nextweb" or "nw". As this becomes
known it will allow developers to make a distinction between user
extensions and community supported proto-specifications.


On 20 December 2012 16:21, Marcos Caceres <w3c@marcosc.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Thursday, December 20, 2012 at 4:16 PM, Clint Hill wrote:
>
> > 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).
> I strongly agree. If we can address that as a group, we should. Having
> said that, prefixing seems like a "safe" starting point.
> >
> > And I totally agree with Marcos: Code is king here and I think there
> should be more efforts on that.
> >
>
> I'd like to research some techniques. We should look at Modernizr and
> friends for this.
>
>
> --
> Marcos Caceres
>
>
>
>
>