[webkit-dev] Removing obsolete File attributes

[Darin Fisher]

On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 12:13 PM, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs at apple.com> wrote:

>
> 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
>
>
>

Perhaps a concrete good first step is to log a console warning when they
are used?  "Warning, blahBlah is a deprecated attribute.  Use fluxCapacitor
instead."

-Darin
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/attachments/20120224/d1adb787/attachment.html>