4 ms·
If sites break, let them break. That's incredibly arrogant, IMO. Imagine the amount of pointless work that would cause world-wide, and the cumulative amount of
by tpmx 5y ago
If sites break, let them break.
That's incredibly arrogant, IMO. Imagine the amount of pointless work that would cause world-wide, and the cumulative amount of pain experienced by readers of the web for years.
It's pure value destruction on a global scale, just making things worse to prove a point.
A better solution is to realize that the UA header has been completely broken for decades and do yet another compat hack, whilst transitioning to some more futureproof mechanism.
The web needs a Linus occasionally screaming: don't break things for shits and giggles.
- coldpie 5y agoYes. Your software doesn't exist in isolation; you have users. Your #1 goal is not to make your software ideologically perfect. Your #1 goal is to make your software useful to its users. Sometimes you have to break things, yes, but these events should be strongly justified and impossible in practice to avoid. Bumping a version number in a user-agent string doesn't rise to that level.
- Beltalowda 5y agoSome people relying on fixed width digits will happen anyway, no matter how you send the version. There's decades of experience with this. It has nothing to do with the User-Agent header as such. With the Chrome "backup plan" literally everyone will have to modify their code to make it work, making it more convoluted in the process. With the "well, just break stuff then" only the small number of people who relied on a fixed width of the version will have stuff break. This seems like a decent enough trade-off, and will almost certainly save programmer time globally.
- coldpie 5y ago> With the Chrome "backup plan" literally everyone will have to modify their code to make it work I don't understand. If you need to detect a >99 version, then yes, you'll need to update your code, but you'll need to do that anyway, to add your >99 logic in the first place. If you don't need to detect that, then no changes are needed, and as a bonus no poorly-coded sites will break.
- dtech 5y agoThe point is not necessarily that this hack is too much, but it's yet another hack on a system that is already so full of hacks that parsing it is incredibly complicated and error-prone, requiring more hacks in the future. It's a self-reinforcing loop. Do we ever say enough is enough?
- coldpie 5y agoIt seems people are working on this, yes. See other comment thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30350659 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30350659 Breaking existing websites is not an acceptable solution.
- Beltalowda 5y agoMy assumption is that everyone who does this will want to detect version >99 sooner or later.