[webkit-dev] Deprecating features guideline wiki

[Ryosuke Niwa]

On Sun, Apr 29, 2012 at 12:37 PM, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs at apple.com> wrote:

>
> On Apr 27, 2012, at 6:29 PM, Dirk Pranke <dpranke at chromium.org> wrote:
>
> BTW, the page at <https://trac.webkit.org/wiki/DeprecatingFeatures> seems
> to be using "deprecate" in the sense of "remove entirely". Is that what is
> meant? If so, I think it would be helpful to change the wording to
> "removing features". In non-Web contexts, deprecate often means a step
> short of removal.
>
> I agree that "Removing features" is clearer and more to the point :).
> When to deprecate features in the sense of "we recommend you use this
> other feature instead" is an entirely different conversation.
>
>
> Now that I look closer, I see that it says:
>
> "Deprecating a feature means we will remove it in the future. Deprecation
> is not meant as a usage metric collection or to assess web-developers'
> reactions."
>
> This seems to imply that there actually is a step of deprecation that
> comes prior to removal. What exactly is this step? How are features
> supposed to be marked deprecated? What is the effect of being deprecated,
> if any, other than future removal? Does anyone who was at the session know
> the answer?
>

I'd assume this is something like outputting a warning in the
console. (Disclaimer: I didn't attend this session.)

My own recommendation would be to just remove features that we've decided
> to remove. Any data gathering related to potential removal should happen
> before we make a decision.
>

I agree that data needs to be gathered before making a decision to remove a
feature.

When we were discussing about adding mutation observer API in the hope to
eventually remove the mutation events, we added histogram callbacks in
WebKit (http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/100222) to figure out the API
usage (in Chromium port). I also searched through js code in the wild via
Google code search (unfortunately no longer available). But we did these
data collections prior to removing the feature. In fact, even prior to
proposing the replacement.

- Ryosuke
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