Re: [XHR] responseType "json"

On Fri, Jan 6, 2012 at 12:18 PM, Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky@mit.edu> wrote:

> On 1/6/12 12:13 PM, Jarred Nicholls wrote:
>
>> WebKit is used in many walled garden environments, so we consider these
>> scenarios, but as a secondary goal to our primary goal of being a
>> standards compliant browser engine.  The point being, there will always
>> be content that's created solely for WebKit, so that's not a good
>> argument to make.  So generally speaking, if someone is aiming to create
>> content that's x-browser compatible, they'll do just that and use the
>> least common denominators.
>>
>
> People never aim to create content that's cross-browser compatible per se,
> with a tiny minority of exceptions.
>
> People aim to create content that reaches users.
>
> What that means is that right now people are busy authoring webkit-only
> websites on the open web because they think that webkit is the only UA that
> will ever matter on mobile.  And if you point out this assumption to these
> people, they will tell you right to your face that it's a perfectly
> justified assumption.  The problem is bad enough that both Trident and
> Gecko have seriously considered implementing support for some subset of
> -webkit CSS properties.  Note that "people" here includes divisions of
> Google.
>
> As a result, any time WebKit deviates from standards, that _will_ 100%
> guaranteed cause sites to be created that depend on those deviations; the
> other UAs then have the choice of not working on those sites or duplicating
> the deviations.
>
> We've seen all this before, circa 2001 or so.
>
> Maybe in this particular case it doesn't matter, and maybe the spec in
> this case should just change, but if so, please argue for that, as the rest
> of your mail does, not for the principle of shipping random spec violations
> just because you want to.   In general if WebKit wants to do special
> webkitty things in walled gardens that's fine.  Don't pollute the web with
> them if it can be avoided.  Same thing applies to other UAs, obviously.


I'm ambivalent about whether we should restrict to utf8 or not. On the one
hand, having everyone on utf8 would greatly simplify the web. On the other
hand, I can imagine this hurting download size for japanese/chinese
websites (i.e. they'd want utf-16).

I agree with Boris that we don't need to pollute the web if we want to
expose this to WebKit's walled-garden environments. We have mechanisms for
exposing things only to those environments specifically to avoid this
problem. Lets keep this discussion focused on what's best for the web. We
can make WebKit do the appropriate thing.