Re: Indicating XHR conformance

"Mark Nottingham" <mnot@yahoo-inc.com>
> On 2006/05/10, at 12:31 PM, Mihai Sucan wrote:
>>
>> When developers have to have their sites compatible with more and  more 
>> user agents (on various devices)... such features are just an  added 
>> layer of headaches for developers who use them.
>
> What would you recommend as an alternative?

That authors write scripts without relying on such behaviour at all.  This 
is what scripters have done for a long time.  There are further problems 
with your example, it's no use if the browser passes all HTTP caching and 
redirect tests, given that an upstream proxy may or may not be involved 
which could change behaviour, so a UA that passes the tests cannot be 
assumed to fully work.  Equally what is an author going to do if the cache 
is not supported correctly?  They'll implement some other mechanism, in that 
situation they might aswell just do that, so the checks are simply 
redundant.

Equally what does "pass all the tests" mean once new tests are added?  So 
there must be individual feature strings for different versions of test 
suites, and a UA will not be able to claim conformance to any version of the 
test suite later than the published date of the UA even if they do actually 
pass them.

hasFeature has so far been an abject failure, it's simply not used, I see no 
reason to waste time resurrecting something that so far has no proven use.

Could you provide some actual use cases for such broken down feature 
strings, I can't see any.

Cheers,

Jim. 

Received on Wednesday, 10 May 2006 20:04:44 UTC