Re: [whatwg/xhr] Abandon hope of removing sync XHR from the web platform? (#20)

I am a web developer, and a web user.

As a web developer -- particularly one who has worked in a big corporate environment, on legacy code, that requires a huge effort to migrate away from bad design decisions made a decade or more ago -- I can absolutely appreciate the value in making the web a "purely additive platform" (per @bedney).  Any time we drop an existing feature, we break legacy code, and a lot of that legacy code lives in unseen systems that don't have a proper support tail.  Any such decision should be made only after careful consideration.

But.  I am also a web user, and as a user, I love to see developers forced to stop using shoddy design patterns that make my experience worse.  As a user, I don't care if they're saddled with some architecture decisions somebody made 20 years ago, or a 3rd-party library that their business relationships force them to integrate.  *Burn it to the ground and do it right*.  If you honestly believe the browser APIs you have available to you don't allow you to design your application without blocking the UI thread for a network call, get on the WHATWG boards (hello!) and lobby for what you need.

I don't expect sync to go away any time in the next 5-10 years, but I agree with the principle of doing everything we can to discourage it -- yes, even for *your* use case, that you think is "legit".  It may well have been, back when you started your project, but you could do it all asynchronously now.  I'm not saying to rewrite everything from scratch today, but you will have to eventually, if not for this breaking change, then for the next one.  The web is alive, and any product you make that doesn't have a maintenance plan, that isn't kept up to date with living standards, *will* become unusable -- not tomorrow, maybe not next year, but eventually it will.

So: I like #178, the idea of site-specific opt-out.  I'd like to take it a step further, and encourage browser manufacturers to put sync support behind a config flag, exposed to (power) users.  Of course it would default to permissive mode, but maybe in 5+ years I could realistically turn it off.  That's how the web gets better -- we deprecate the bad features.  Sync XHR was one of them.

-- 
You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread.
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
https://github.com/whatwg/xhr/issues/20#issuecomment-364195993