[webkit-dev] Standard Compliance as a Project Goal (Was WebKit branch to support multiple VMs)

[Dominic Cooney]

First: Oliver and webkit-dev, sorry for the above email; I wrote it in
haste and am now repenting it at leisure.

Ryosuke—you’re right; given that the WebKit project goals page has ten
high-level goals, of course activity is guided by some trade-off between
them.

Dominic

On Thu, Dec 8, 2011 at 3:00 AM, Ryosuke Niwa <rniwa at webkit.org> wrote:

> Starting new thread...
>
> On Wed, Dec 7, 2011 at 1:13 AM, Dominic Cooney <dominicc at chromium.org>wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Dec 7, 2011 at 4:53 PM, Oliver Hunt <oliver at apple.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> On Dec 6, 2011, at 11:49 PM, Dominic Cooney wrote:
>>>
>>> On Wed, Dec 7, 2011 at 1:44 AM, Oliver Hunt <oliver at apple.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Dec 6, 2011, at 2:55 AM, Anton Muhin wrote:
>>>>
>>>> > Good day, everyone!
>>>> >
>>>> > I am sorry if it didn't sound clear enough in our original message,
>>>> > but we're not proposing a new language support, but we're proposing a
>>>> > patch which allows others runtimes to run along with JS in the
>>>> > browser.
>>>> >
>>>> > Of course, we're doing this because of our work on Dart, but our
>>>> > intent was to solicit a feedback from the WebKit community if there is
>>>> > any interest in supporting runtimes additional to JS (and not JS +
>>>> > Dart) in the first place.
>>>> As I have already said, we already support multiple bindings being in
>>>> use at the same time.
>>>
>>>
>>> Those bindings are different because the code that uses them is not
>>> activated from web pages. Looking at the specific posted patches, those
>>> changes seem necessary to support activating a different language from a
>>> page eg <script> tag. So I think while that your specific claim that WebKit
>>> supports multiple bindings at the same time is true, it misses the point.
>>>
>>> No I was getting sick of the continual claim that this was about
>>> supporting multiple VMs/bindings, rather than adding proprietary extensions
>>> to webkit
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>>  Continuing to claim that is your goal is not helpful.  Your goal is to
>>>> allow additional non-standard languages to be provided by webcontent.  This
>>>> is an academic exercise as it doesn't match webkit's goal of being a
>>>> standards compliant engine,
>>>
>>>
>>> Is that WebKit’s goal?
>>>
>>>
>>> Um, yes.  From http://www.webkit.org/projects/goals.html (I'm fairly
>>> sure this has already been quoted in an earlier email but just to bring it
>>> back in context):
>>>  GoalsWeb Content EngineThe project's primary focus is content deployed
>>> on the World Wide Web, using standards-based technologies such as HTML,
>>> CSS, JavaScript and the DOM.
>>> --Oliver
>>>
>>
>> I intended the question about whether standards compliance was a goal
>> rhetorically, in that it seems to me that this goal is honored or ignored
>> capriciously.
>>
>
> While standards compliance is clearly a good goal, we do have constraints
> such as having to be compatible with the existing Web content, and for that
> matter, be consistent with other UAs.
>
> Perhaps, what you experienced is that? (i.e. conflict of interests between
> standards compliance vs. Web/backwards compatibility)
>
> - Ryosuke
>
>
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