Re: [whatwg] Proposal: navigator.launchURL

On Mon, Jul 14, 2014 at 3:28 PM, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
> 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.

Ok, we can try the window.open approach first.

Adam

Received on Tuesday, 15 July 2014 03:49:25 UTC