Re: [shadow dom] relitigation

> On Dec 17, 2014, at 3:18 PM, Brian Kardell <bkardell@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Dec 17, 2014 at 3:24 PM, Ryosuke Niwa <rniwa@apple.com <mailto:rniwa@apple.com>> wrote:
> Hi Brian,
> 
> The WebKit team has given a lot of feedback over the years on the Shadow DOM spec.  We wouldn't have done that if we didn't care about it. :)  We're excited to hear that Mozilla is planning to give more feedback on Custom Elements and Shadow DOM because we feel that much of their feedback resonates with us.
> 
> Having said that, our feedback has largely been dismissed or has not been adequately addressed.  I'm sure you can imagine that this does not encourage us to invest much more time or effort into providing additional feedback.
> 
> I can definitely appreciate that when you sink time into discussion and things don't appear to go that way it seems frustrating and doesn't promote good feelings about investing further.  At the same time, I'm sure you can appreciate that this leaves things in a frustrating/confusing spot for so many developers and their orgs around the world because of where this particular piece of the puzzle lies.  I'm glad to hear that Mozilla's position/feedback resonates but I'm still unclear.

I sympathize with the sentiment.  However, regardless of which browsers implement Shadow DOM and Custom Elements today, Web developers won't be able to use them without fallbacks since many users would be using older Web browsers that don't support these features.

> I have followed all of these discussions pretty closely and even today after some searching I am not sure about which feedback regarding Shadow DOM specifically you feel still requires addressing?  Discussion about type 1, 2 boundary seems to have died off - was there some other?

We've argued not to expose the shadow root of a host by default many times.  In fact, we got an agreement over a year ago to add a private mode (type II encapsulation) to the Shadow DOM.  However, the corresponding bug [1], which was filed in November 2012, hasn't been resolved yet.  We've been extremely firm on this position but we don't feel compelled to keep making the same point every six months.  We also care about the cross-origin use cases as we outlined last year [2].  In addition, we feel strongly that the current model of inheritance is broken [3].  These are three significant differences I can think of off the top of my head now.

> Is there any hope of resolving that if that's what you mean, or would this require significant change?

Addressing these concerns would likely result in a lot of changes to the Shadow DOM specification.  This is precisely why we tried to give much of our feedback as early as we could.

- R. Niwa

[1] https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=20144
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webapps/2013OctDec/0418.html
[3] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webapps/2014AprJun/0151.html