Re: [webcomponents] Standard Use Case (Was Auto-creating shadow DOM for custom elements)

On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 4:04 PM, Ryosuke Niwa <rniwa@apple.com> wrote:

> On Dec 9, 2013, at 9:34 PM, Ryosuke Niwa <rniwa@apple.com> wrote:
>
> On Dec 9, 2013, at 11:13 AM, Scott Miles <sjmiles@google.com> wrote:
>
> I'm not wont to try to summarize it here, since he said it already better
> there. Perhaps the short version is: nobody knows what the 'standard use
> case' is yet.
>
>
> How is that possible given we've already spent 2+ years on the whole web
> components effort?
>
>
> I don't want to start a word game here
>

Really? Because that is exactly what you are doing. This is the equivalent
of "no offense, but..." It's disingenuous to put it mildly.


> but if it's really true that we don't know what web components' the
> primary/standard use case is, then we have a much bigger issue here.
>

And here's where you start the word game, by adding words and subtly
changing the definition from what was obviously intended, and then fighting
against your new straw man.

You know exactly what was meant by what Scott said. How developers and the
wider ecosystem of the web will precisely use the primitives provided by
the platform and the patterns that then emerge are unknown at best at this
early stage. We know what use cases we are trying to solve, and so do you.
By providing the lowest-level primitives possible, we're opening the door
to use cases we haven't even considered. This is A Good Thing.

>
> We need to design features and APIs to address specific use cases.  We
> don't design an API in the hope that that it'll magically address some use
> cases.
>

We also don't design APIs and features with the audacity to think we
understand the entire universe of use cases as they will ever exist. The
creativity of the developer ecosystem will always find a more clever usage,
provided we don't hamstring them by only providing high level abstractions
in the name of developer ergonomics.

Here's where you fork this again, ask for opinions outside of Google/Apple,
or misconstrue what I wrote and argue against that. Carry on.

-Matt