Re: ISSUE-119: names lengthComputable and total

On Mon, 10 Dec 2007 17:54:49 +0100, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>  
wrote:

> On Dec 10, 2007, at 8:17 AM, Jean-Yves Bitterlich wrote:

>> Maciej Stachowiak wrote:

>>> In general I don't think we want to set a precedent of locking in bad  
>>> names in Editor's Drafts without a compelling reason. An  
>>> implementation alone is not much reason, there would have to be  
>>> significant content depending on it.

>> agreed. However, JSR-280 is Final Release: i.e. a Reference  
>> Implementation (RI) as well as a Test and Compatibility Kit (TCK) are  
>> available and licensed/licensable; Moreover a development kit  is also  
>> available and compliant.
>> This looks compelling enough ... to me :-)

> What would look compelling to me is web content depending on the  
> specific names. That's more important than whether someone shipped an  
> implementation.

That could indeed be a much more compelling argument. Can you show that  
such content does or does not exist?

Having an implementation that is difficult to change, shipped in millions  
of devices, does seem like an argument of some strength in the absence of  
a strong counter argument.

> I'll admit that method naming isn't the biggest issue. But it seems like  
> bad precedent to start giving weight to external standards that copy  
> very early stage W3C standards, as this subverts the W3C's own standards  
> process, which runs by different rules than the Java Community Process.

The base specification has been around for a long time (we inherited it  
 from SVG), and it was pretty baked already. People have implemented,  
people have written it up (although it is only draft), and based other  
stuff on it. Others have just chosen equally bad names for the same thing.  
And fundamentally, this naming issue doesn't seem to be a really big deal.

Given the relative unimportance of method naming, in the interests of  
building on and further developing a consistent body of material, of  
building more trust in the work we have done, and of moving forward, it  
seems to me a reasonable choice in this case to maintain compatibility  
with what we have had for a couple of years or so.

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile  Opera Software, Standards Group
     je parle français -- hablo español -- jeg lærer norsk
http://my.opera.com/chaals   Try Opera 9.5: http://snapshot.opera.com

Received on Monday, 10 December 2007 19:16:54 UTC