Re: Proposition to change the prefixing policy

On Sun, May 6, 2012 at 11:44 PM, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com> wrote:
> My feeling is that the points I cited below are mostly plausible reasons to delay CR, but not particularly good reasons to delay unprefixing, at least in my opinion. Once there is rough interoperability in practice, then continued persistence of prefixes is actively damaging, and the benefit of isolating experimental or proprietary properties is considerably lower. I realize that others may want to draw the tradeoffs differently. I just wanted to point out that the gap in practice between your proposed approach and mine is likely to be quite large. Consider the thought experiment of how these approaches might have applied to recent examples such as transforms, transitions, gradients, etc.

I don't think we can actually *do* a "rough interop" thing without
testing, though.  We'd just be going off our gut instinct, and
whatever ad hoc testing we'd done on our own.  Might as well write
real tests for it so everyone can agree, without having to bring
feelings into the mix.

Some of your points are relevant if you're thinking about the
difference in time between "proved interop for a feature" and "reached
CR for a feature".  (In particulary, "UAs match each other, but not
the spec", "groups request extra LC time for review", "addressing LC
comments can take extra time", and potentially "not enough editing
resources to handle an LC".)  However, I'll argue that should
contribute, at most, about 3 months extra time to the unprefixing
point.  At best, it'll add 1.5 months or so.  I don't think this
difference is significant for the problems we're solving.

~TJ

Received on Sunday, 6 May 2012 21:53:46 UTC