On Nov 30, 2009, at 3:45 PM, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
WebKit (or at least the mainline) is not necessarily a great place
for experiments. As our Project Goals say: "WebKit is an engineering
project, not a science project." <http://webkit.org/projects/goals.html
>. Of course, that's a pretty fuzzy line, because sometimes a use
case is really well proven and we're not willing to wait for
standards groups to get their butt in gear. But there are some
potential bad scenarios with building features that don't have a
clear path to standardization:
1) It will be rejected by other browser vendors and end up a WebKit-
only (or nearly WebKit-only) feature, but enough WebKit-specific
content depends on it that we can't drop it, even if we would like
to. Then we are stuck maintaining a dead-end technology
indefinitely. It seems like the SQL database may be on this path.
This is really the scenario to worry about the most. Having to
support "failed" technologies is painful.
2) It will get adopted into standards, but with significant changes
when other implementors and standards experts jump on the bandwagon.
These changes can cause a very painful transition, since we need to
remain compatible with legacy WebKit-specific content, yet at the
same time we don't want to be in violation of the consensus spec.
This actually happened with <canvas> - it changed incompatibly in
ways that broke a bunch of WebKit-specific content (in particular
Dashboard widgets), but we had to implement the standard to support
content coded to Firefox. This really sucked and we have Dashboard-
specific hacks still lying around in our code base as a result.
I don't really think it's fair to bring this up as a negative. Having
the experiment adopted as a standard is a complete win. That the
transition from experiment to reality can be painful is just an
inevitable consequence of a maturing standard.
CSS gradients are a good example. The new syntax coming out of the
CSS WG is way better, but none of it would have happened without the
initial WebKit experiment. Because of that experiment we're
eventually going to have gradients in all browsers. Will the
transition be a bit painful? Sure, but the end result is that we
pushed the Web forward.
Now I don't know if GlobalScript falls into this category or not. If
no other browser vendors are interested in it, we should be pretty
wary. If we think the implementation of the feature can change their
minds, though, then I'd say it's worth at least experimenting with.
What do other browser vendors think of this feature right now?
dave
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