Re: Conflicts between W3C specs and ES5?

On Nov 16, 2009, at 7:27 AM, Brendan Eich wrote:

> On Nov 16, 2009, at 2:38 AM, James Graham wrote:
>
>> However it does document things that are required for ECMAScript  
>> implementations that want to work with web content, as evidenced by  
>> the fact that even greenfield implementations, such as V8,  
>> implement the things described on that page.
>
> You mean even green-field but stealthy for two years from a big  
> company that has means to persuade a few bad sites to fix their  
> content implementations :-/.
>
> I heard that junk like foo.arguments was used on only one  
> significant site (nba.com? Someone at Google knows). That at some  
> small cost this could not be fixed so implementations can skip it is  
> unclear.
>
> Mozilla turns some bugs into Technology Evangelism bugs instead of  
> slavishly implementing every IE-compatible mistake we can find. Yes,  
> this is imperfect and we are obviously also guilty of following  
> extant content instead of leading it. But too much following, and  
> too much over-specifying, and you will paint yourself into a corner.
>
> The opportunity cost (that you spend time on trailing edge stuff  
> instead of better leading edge work) is very high too.

Did you look at the contents of the Wiki page? foo.arguments is not in  
there, nor is anything of a similar level of evil. Many of the things  
on that page (for example the HTML-formatting String functions) look  
like things we should just spec in ECMAScript. Let's save our outrage  
for features that actually break conceptual integrity of the language,  
rather than just being slightly lame You also said (earlier) that the  
page describes browser differences, but from my reading many (most?)  
of the things mentioned are totally cross-browser compatible, just not  
specified anywhere yet.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Tuesday, 17 November 2009 00:29:19 UTC