Re: [whatwg] Proposal: navigator.launchURL

On Mon, 14 Jul 2014, Adam Barth wrote:
> >
> > I'm skeptical of features that only have a benefit during a short 
> > transition phase. Suppose it's five years from now and now everyone 
> > implements window.open() in this cleaner way and everyone also has 
> > launchURL(). Why is it good that we have both?
> 
> You're presupposing a particular series of future events.  It's more 
> likely that it will take longer than five years.  As an example, we 
> shipped unprefixed support for border-radius in May 2010, and browser 
> support is still only ~85% of traffic:
> 
> http://caniuse.com/#search=border-radius

It doesn't really matter how long it takes. The time until authors can 
stop using the <iframe> hack is the same whether we provide a new API or 
have a legacy API that needs updating to be slightly less annoying.


> If web developers need to wait for the long tail of browsers to catch
> up before they can use a feature, they're unlikely to adopt it.

They can use window.open() today. It's just that it causes a bit of 
flicker for now. IMHO the flicker is just a bug we should fix.

Introducing a new API that literally doesn't do anything you can't already 
do is a pretty high cost, IMHO.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Monday, 14 July 2014 22:29:04 UTC