Re: [POWER] New vs Legacy functionality (Re: "Requirements for Powerful Features" strawman.)

On 9 December 2014 at 12:33, Mike West <mkwst@google.com> wrote:
> Are there examples that folks have in mind of replacement features that
> really should prioritize usage in this way? It might be easier to have a
> concrete discussion than an abstract one.

It's perhaps a little contrived, but there are two entry points to
getUserMedia, one of which was only recently added.  The newer one
returns a Promise, whereas the old one uses callbacks.  It's a
powerful feature, no question.  But saying that the new one is
automatically subject to new rules around secure origins could cause
some interesting issues.

> That said, the spec only distinguishes between "new" and "legacy" in order
> to make it clear that we intend to put existing features under the lens, and
> to make it clear that we're advocating a sane deprecation process rather
> than saying "It's insecure, turn it off tomorrow." I do not intend that
> distinction to be perceived as anything like a persistent grandfathering-in
> of features that we'd hopefully design differently today.

Yes, this cuts both ways.  If the statement is simply: "you are
(strongly) encouraged to examine APIs (old and new) based on this
statement and debate whether actions are necessary", then this is
perfectly fine.  I don't think that we can force the reconstitution of
old groups for the purposes of making this one change, but
encouragement is always OK.

Received on Tuesday, 9 December 2014 20:52:02 UTC