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With Win32 and Cocoa you pretty much have one vendor with roughly 3 or so major releases. But with browsers you have roughly 8 vendors above 1% market-share wit

by tabtab 8y ago

With Win32 and Cocoa you pretty much have one vendor with roughly 3 or so major releases. But with browsers you have roughly 8 vendors above 1% market-share with 3 or so (notable) major releases each. Therefore, you have to target roughly 8x more variations of the UI engine. Look how hard Wine's job is to be sufficiently compatible. I believe we need to either simplify the front-end standards (pushing as much as possible to the server), or fork browsers into specialities: games, media, CRUD, documents, etc. What we have now sucks bigly. Try something different, please!

pcwalton 8y ago
Interoperability, and the standards process, is how we get specs that are sensible. Whenever I have to program using Win32, Cocoa, etc. I inevitably spend a ton of time reverse engineering how the proprietary APIs work. For DOM APIs, things generally work how they are supposed to work, because they were actually designed in the first place (well, the more recent APIs were). Wine isn't comparable, because the Web APIs are designed by an open vendor-neutral standards committee and have multiple interoperable open-source implementations. Your proposals break Web compatibility and so are non-starters. Coming up with fixes for problems in the DOM and CSS is the easy part. Figuring out how to deploy them is what's difficult.
- tabtab 8y ago
  Re: "the standards process, is how we get specs that are sensible." - They are not sensible: different vendors interpret the grey areas differently. A sufficiently thorough written standard would be longer and harder-to-read than the code itself to implement such. Re: "Your proposals break Web compatibility" -- Web compatibility is whatever we make it. A one-size-fits-all UI/render standard has proven a mess. What's the harm in at least trying domain-specific standards? We all have theories, but only the real world can really test such theories.

by tabtab 8y ago

pcwalton 8y ago

Interoperability, and the standards process, is how we get specs that are sensible. Whenever I have to program using Win32, Cocoa, etc. I inevitably spend a ton of time reverse engineering how the proprietary APIs work. For DOM APIs, things generally work how they are supposed to work, because they were actually designed in the first place (well, the more recent APIs were). Wine isn't comparable, because the Web APIs are designed by an open vendor-neutral standards committee and have multiple interoperable open-source implementations. Your proposals break Web compatibility and so are non-starters. Coming up with fixes for problems in the DOM and CSS is the easy part. Figuring out how to deploy them is what's difficult.

tabtab 8y ago
Re: "the standards process, is how we get specs that are sensible." - They are not sensible: different vendors interpret the grey areas differently. A sufficiently thorough written standard would be longer and harder-to-read than the code itself to implement such. Re: "Your proposals break Web compatibility" -- Web compatibility is whatever we make it. A one-size-fits-all UI/render standard has proven a mess. What's the harm in at least trying domain-specific standards? We all have theories, but only the real world can really test such theories.