Re: Proposition to change the prefixing policy

On 5/5/12 9:45 AM, Lea Verou wrote:
> 1. It has been mentioned in this thread that it’s against company policy
> of several implementors.

Indeed.  I think said company policies are actively harmful...  Not like 
the working group can do anything about it per se, other than exerting 
public opinion pressure.

> 2. It defies the entire advantage that prefixes were supposed to bring:
> Getting author input for in-development features. When the feature is
> present only in a preview (or in a stable build, but behind a switch),
> the volume of author feedback declines tremendously.

Yes, indeed.  Does it decline by enough to offset the benefits?  I'd be 
interested in numbers; my totally non-scientific impression from the 
"looking at the bug database" side is that Mozilla gets a large fraction 
of our useful feedback for spec purposes (not compat purposes, mind you) 
from our nightly and aurora builds as things stand.  Of course I could 
just be missing a significant feedback channel.

> I believe Alex Russell has specific statistics of how big a decline we’re talking
> about, but I recall it’s > 90%.

I would be very interested in seeing those numbers and the specific 
context for them.

> This would result in specs being
> developed almost blindly, detached from the reality of author needs. Do
> we want that?

No, not at all.

-Boris