[webkit-dev] New feature announcement - Implement HTML5 Microdata in WebKit

[Dean Jackson]

On 23/09/2011, at 5:59 AM, Ian Hickson wrote:

> On Thu, 22 Sep 2011, Charles Pritchard wrote:
>> 
>> Regardless of an ENABLE flag, be certain to use the webkit prefix.
>> document.getItems(typeNames) turns into
>> document.webkitGetItems(typeNames)
>> 
>> Note that it's easy to implement this in pure javascript as a prototype.
> 
> Assuming the patch implements the spec correctly, no need to use a prefix 
> -- I'll track the implementations and ensure no conflicts.

That's an interesting approach to prefixing - I commend the volunteering
of your time. 

However, isn't prefixing designed to avoid incompatibilities in spec
changes, not incompatibilities between implementations? Ensuring no
conflicts in implementations doesn't matter too much if the spec changes.

Note I'm not talking about Microdata in particular. I don't even know
what that spec is :) I'm just talking about the general approach. If
the world can guarantee that this spec will never change, then I guess
your technique works.

FWIW, there is an in-between approach, which is the one used by
WebGL. It defines a prefix that all implementations share.

canvas.getContext("experimental-webgl");

Dean