Re: XPath and Selectors are identical, and shouldn't be co-developed

On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 12:28 PM, Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de> wrote:
> On 2011-11-29 21:24, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
>> On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 12:18 PM, Julian Reschke<julian.reschke@gmx.de>
>>  wrote:
>>> On 2011-11-29 20:07, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
>>>> ...
>>>> Since XPath and Selectors are 95% overlapping in functionality and
>>>> 100% overlapping in goals and overall structure, I believe it is a bad
>>>> idea to try and develop both for the web platform.  Instead, we should
>>>> ...
>>>
>>> The proposal wasn't to "develop" XPath as in "doing more work on the
>>> expression language".
>>>
>>> What *was* proposed is to fix/standardize the API for XPath, which
>>> already
>>> is part of the web platform.
>>
>> Speccing, implementing, and testing an API is also "developing",
>> particularly when it appears there's a desire to spec, implement, and
>> test a new, more convenient API that's currently proprietary to a few
>> browsers.  For the reasons stated in my email, I believe this effort
>> to be a bad idea.
>
> Well, if people are ready to do the specification, implementation and
> testing work, what's the reason to stop them? Yes, I know, "opportunity
> cost". But guess what, that's not going to be a convincing argument for
> those who really want that feature.

I never threatened physical harm to anyone attempting to work on it; I
can't stop them if they really want to.  My stated goal was to argue
that working on XPath is a bad idea, and that any editor effort can be
better spent elsewhere (either directly on Selectors, or on the rest
of the web platform).  I also attempted to combat some statements I
saw cropping up repeatedly which were incorrect.

~TJ

Received on Tuesday, 29 November 2011 20:43:54 UTC