RE: Versioning and HTML

Ian Hickson [mailto:ian@hixie.ch] wrote:
>On Fri, 24 Apr 2009, Chris Wilson wrote:
>> The only way out of this would be for EVERY browser to very carefully
>> only ship "proprietary-marked" (a la CSS' vendor extensions) versions of
>> APIs/elements until the standard moves OUT of CR, and then add support
>> for the standard naming and deprecate their proprietary-marked versions
>> over time.
>
>Or at least, to do so with features that don't have obvious ways to be
>updated without needing version syntax. Why is that a problem?

I didn't say it was - but aside from CSS, that's not what is happening.  Actually, there is the problem that web developers would have to abstract their code to point to the mostly-interoperable implementations of a feature, until that feature moved out of CR - you shouldn't use <canvas> today, then, you should use <webkit-canvas>, <moz-canvas>, etc.  We've had this question internally - e.g. for rounded border corners, should IE bother doing -ms-border-radius, or just skip straight to border-radius?

I'm not against the above as a process, you understand - I'm just pointing out that this isn't the way that vendors are doing things today, outside of CSS.

>In the case of the spec changing while there is already an implementation,
>it's not like the spec is going to have BOTH versions defined, and it's
>not like other browsers are going to want to impement BOTH versions.

It sort of depends what third-party applications are built on that browser-specific implementation, I expect.  Sort of like if GMail is built on Safari's SQL store support, and the spec changes to abstract that more.  What should the spec do, in this case?

-Chris

Received on Monday, 27 April 2009 16:28:24 UTC