Re: Proposition to change the prefixing policy

On 5/4/12 11:02 AM, "Boris Zbarsky" <bzbarsky@MIT.EDU> wrote:

>On 5/4/12 1:26 PM, Florian Rivoal wrote:
>> In the cases where implementations and real world usage are ahead of the
>> spec, then yes, it would limit the ability of the WG to make
>>incompatible
>> changes. But this isn't necessarily bad.
>
>It can be quite bad.
>
>Several WG members have indicated on numerous occasions that as a matter
>of company policy they are unable to propose something for
>standardization until they have shipped a (prefixed, at the moment)
>implementation of it.  What this means with your proposal is that any
>ideas they have, no matter how half-baked, would have to be dumped out
>on the web without a prefix before they could even start to bring them
>to the working group.

I do not think this would necessarily be the case. Experiments and
browser-specific features could still be added with a vendor prefix only.
We could mandate that the unprefixed version (aliased to the prefixed
version) could only come after the appropriate standards body had a
proposal in hand and agreed to work on it.

This might also help the evangelism side of standardization. Right now you
can talk about a prefixed version of something and it's not always clear
whether it's a browser-specific feature or an upcoming standard. If we
follow Florian's proposal then any vendor-prefixed version is either a
browser-specific feature or a temporary bug workaround. Standards
evangelism could concentrate on just the un-prefixed features (noting
vendor-prefixed fixes only if necessary).

Thanks,

Alan

Received on Friday, 4 May 2012 18:15:17 UTC