Re: Proposition to change the prefixing policy

On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 9:11 AM, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com> wrote:
> On May 8, 2012, at 6:23 AM, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi> wrote:
>>> On Saturday 2012-05-05 15:02 -0700, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>>>> (B) At least two independent roughly interoperable (though not necessarily identical in all edge cases) implementations are publicly available.

>> Is there a historical example of a case where
>> condition (B) was true and a W3C working group managed to purge the
>> feature from the Web platform to such an extent that other vendors
>> didn't need to implement it and could still successfully render the
>> Web?
>
> In fairness I'll note that this may end up being the case with WebSQL. Though the jury is still out, and it is used enough on mobile-targeted sites that additional vendors seeking mobile market share may in the end choose to implement it. Worth noting that it shipped unprefixed, in part because there seemed to be rough consensus at the time it was initially proposed that it was a good addition to the Web platform, and strong objections to it were not submitted until years later. Also, the vendors objecting to it managed to get the spec removed from the standards track. I am not sure exactly what point this example makes, but it seems like an illustration of attempted purging.

I think condition (B) never held for Web SQL Database. The
implementations were not independent, because they all wrapped SQLite.
That no one was willing to make a genuinely independent implementation
was part of the reason it was removed from the standards track.

After thinking about my question more, I figured that <meta>-based
cache control would probably qualify, though I think there wouldn't
have been a chance to remove it from Gecko if it hadn't happened by
semi-accident after which we were in a situation where we found it was
really hard to put it back.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Wednesday, 9 May 2012 07:25:21 UTC