Re: Thread-Safe DOM // was Re: do not deprecate synchronous XMLHttpRequest

On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 4:45 AM, Marc Fawzi <marc.fawzi@gmail.com> wrote:
> how long can this be sustained? forever? what is the point in time where the
> business of retaining backward compatibility becomes a huge nightmare?

It already is, but there's no way out.  This is true everywhere in
computing.  Look closely at almost any protocol, API, language, etc.
that dates back 20 years or more and has evolved a lot since then, and
you'll see tons of cruft that just causes headaches but can't be
eliminated.  Like the fact that Internet traffic is largely in
1500-byte packets because that's the maximum size you could have on
ancient shared cables without ambiguity in the case of collision.  Or
that e-mail is mostly sent in plaintext, with no authentication of
authorship, because that's what made sense in the 80s (or whatever).
Or how almost all web traffic winds up going over TCP, which performs
horribly on all kinds of modern usage patterns.  For that matter, I'm
typing this with a keyboard layout that was designed well over a
century ago to meet the needs of mechanical typewriters, but it became
standard, so now everyone uses it due to inertia.

This is all horrible, but that's life.

Received on Thursday, 12 February 2015 11:47:02 UTC