Re: Proposition to change the prefixing policy

On Mon, May 7, 2012 at 12:21 AM, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com> wrote:
> Gut feeling is what is used to drive unprefixed implementation of HTML elements and attributes, JS-exposed Web APIs, and DOM event names. That's largely because there is no formal policy at all for unprefixing those things. Do you believe that the gut feeling approach has been actively harmful in those cases? If so, can you give an example of the kinds of bad results you are worried about?
>
> I'm asking in part because I feel that the vague prefixing rules that apply in other Web standards domains are a little bit too vague, but I can't think of examples of specific harm.
>
> I understand and sympathize with your desire for an objective standard. However, in my experience, fully specified formal rules (including ones I've created myself) can have significant downsides. Formal rules can create perverse incentives and opportunities for gaming the system. Exercising subjective judgment is harder to do, but also harder to game.

That "gut feeling" only works because people are doing ad hoc testing
to establish interop (as an input to the "are we stable yet?"
question).  If there's testing going on anyway, I don't see the harm
in making it explicit, so we have the start of a test-suite already
completed.


> Can you cite an example where the time from "people start thinking about LC" to "enter CR" was 1.5 months? My impression is that the minimum is a good deal higher, but maybe you're aware of some examples that I am not.

That's not the time period I was talking about - I'm estimating the
time from "declare LC for a feature" to "enter CR for the feature".
Tantek's proposal makes the former much more automatic, which avoids
some of the delay points you're worried about.

~TJ

Received on Sunday, 6 May 2012 22:47:19 UTC