- From: Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky@mit.edu>
- Date: Wed, 11 Feb 2015 22:13:47 -0500
- To: Marc Fawzi <marc.fawzi@gmail.com>
- CC: public-webapps <public-webapps@w3.org>
On 2/11/15 9:45 PM, Marc Fawzi wrote: > this "backward compatibility" stuff is making me think that the web is > built upon the axiom that we will never start over and we must keep > piling up new features and principles on top of the old ones Pretty much, yep. > this has worked so far, miraculously and not without overhead, but I can > only assume that it's at the cost of growing complexity in the browser > codebase. To some extent, yes. Browsers have obviously been doing refactoring and simplification as they go, but I think it's pretty clear that a minimal viable browser today is a lot more complicated than one 10 years ago. > I'm sure you have to manage a ton of code that has to do with > old features and old ideas... Sometimes. Sometimes it can just be expressed easily in terms of the newer stuff. And sometimes we do manage to remove things -- I'm seeing it happen right now with plugins, which definitely fall in the bucket of a ton of annoying-to-maintain code. > how long can this be sustained? forever? If we're lucky, yes. > what is the point in time where > the business of retaining backward compatibility becomes a huge nightmare? About 10-15 years ago, really. We've just gotten pretty good at facing the nightmare. ;) -Boris
Received on Thursday, 12 February 2015 03:14:17 UTC