[webkit-dev] Removing obsolete File attributes

[Maciej Stachowiak]

On Feb 24, 2012, at 12:06 PM, Darin Fisher wrote:

> 
> 
> On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 12:00 PM, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs at apple.com> wrote:
> 
> On Feb 24, 2012, at 11:52 AM, Darin Fisher wrote:
> 
>> As I mentioned in the bug, it is encouraging news that Mozilla has already removed these attributes (for a couple releases now).  I would like to see them go away too.
>> 
>> There's unfortunately, the real possibility that there may be some existing webkit-specific or chrome-specific (extensions) content out there that is expecting these properties to exist.  I think we need to be a bit cautious since we've included these properties in webkit for such a long time (since 2008!).  Here's the revision that added them: http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/34702
> 
> Is there a good way to quantify and/or mitigate this risk?
> 
> Well, we could certainly instrument a Chrome nightly build to measure accesses made on these attributes, and see what that turns up.  I haven't thought about it enough to decide what a good metric would be.  You probably want to know the percentage of unique pages that depend on these features.  It is probably easier to measure percentage of navigations that resulted in a document that depended on these features.  That would over-estimate usage if a page that needs these features is navigated to frequently.
> 
> I'm concerned that it may be tricky to grep the repository of Chrome extensions (or Google's index of the web) since "fileName" and "fileSize" are likely to be very common terms.

Though you did not say so explicitly, it sounded to me like your suggested approach to this issue was "let's remove these eventually, but maybe not right now". That sounds like a reasonable approach.

But then we'll need to figure out if it's actually too costly to remove them right now, and if so, figure out how to get to the point that we feel comfortable removing them. I don't really have a specific kind of idea of what data would tell us these things.  Your suggestions above seem ok.

Regards,
Maciej


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/attachments/20120224/c4a299f6/attachment.html>