Re: XBL2

On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 6:06 AM, Arthur Barstow <art.barstow@nokia.com> wrote:
>  Do we have a sense yet regarding who supports XBL2 as in the 2007 Candidate
> version [CR] versus who supports the version Hixie recently published in
> [Draft]?
>
> Feedback from all (potential) implementers would be especially useful.
>
> Thinking aloud here, perhaps [Draft] could be positioned more like XBL1++
> e.g. the XBL Note [Note] + bug fixes? (BTW, wow, didn't realize it's been
> almost 10 years since that Note was published.)

I can't answer the question you asked directly, but I can shed some
light on the reasoning behind this.

A group of us engineers at Chrome have been brainstorming on ways to
make the web platform easier to develop apps in.  One of the ideas we
came up with was conceptually very similar to what XBL2 does.  We
tried to avoid actually using XBL2, though, because we weren't happy
with several of the design decisions in the spec.  We then had some
quick sanity/strategy meetings with other browser devs, particularly
those who were involved or interested in XBL2.  From that, we
eventually decided that we probably shouldn't throw away the useful
work that's already been done in XBL2, and instead see what we can do
to work with it.

The rest then unfolded as Ian described - with several people actually
dusting the spec off and looking at in the light of modern practice,
we realized that, while the core is basically sound, there's a lot of
edge detail that doesn't make as much sense today as it did back when
the spec was originally written.  Thus, Ian cleaned it up and pushed
the current revision out for comment.  I still don't know if we
(Chrome) are completely happy with the design, but it's much closer to
our ideal, and we're experimenting with it so we can provide good
feedback.

~TJ

Received on Friday, 17 September 2010 17:06:34 UTC