On Wed, May 7, 2014 at 6:45 PM, Vladimir Vukicevic <vladim...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Wednesday, May 7, 2014 9:30:27 AM UTC-4, Henri Sivonen wrote: > >> >> In general, I'm worried about groups that are rather isolated and that >> have non-Web background members making decisions that go against the >> Web wisdom gained from painful experience. > > The WebGL group wasn't/isn't isolated from the general web. I chaired the > group when the original decisions were made, the other members of the group > were all core developers of WebKit, Chrome, and Opera. That's still the case.
Yet, it specified a feature whose behavior differs depending on the endianness of the host computer as if it was reasonable to expect Web developers to deal with that. >> WebGL already made the Web little-endian forever. > > And good thing it did! The "Web wisdom" also had a bad habit of making > non-pragmatic decisions in the past in order to appease everyone with a seat > on whatever committee was making whatever recommendation to some working > group. Making the Web little-endian may indeed have been the right thing. Still, at least from the outside, it looks like the WebGL group didn't make an intentional wise decision to make the Web little-endian but instead made a naive decision that coupled with the general Web developer behavior and the dominance of little-endian hardware resulted in the Web becoming little-endian. http://www.khronos.org/registry/typedarray/specs/latest/#2.1 still says "The typed array view types operate with the endianness of the host computer. " instead of saying "The typed array view types operate in the little-endian byte order. Don't build big endian systems anymore." *Maybe* that's cunning politics to get a deliberate little-endianization pass without more objection, but from the spec and a glance at the list archives it sure looks like the WebGL group thought that it's reasonable to let Web developers deal with the API behavior differing on big-endian and little-endian computers, which isn't at all a reasonable expectation given everything we know about Web developers. -- Henri Sivonen hsivo...@hsivonen.fi https://hsivonen.fi/ _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
