[webkit-dev] Adding ENABLE_NAVIGATOR_BUILDTYPE to WebCore

[Dean Jackson]

On 07/06/2012, at 1:10 PM, Adam Barth <abarth at webkit.org> wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 7, 2012 at 1:00 PM, Ryosuke Niwa <rniwa at webkit.org> wrote:
>> On Wed, Jun 6, 2012 at 1:51 PM, Annie Sullivan <sullivan at chromium.org>
>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> I wanted to let you know that I plan to add support for
>>> navigator.buildType (e.g., "nightly", "beta", "final") to WebKit. This
>>> feature isn't on the standards track (but neither are a bunch of other
>>> similar properties on Navigator). This feature will be behind the
>>> ENABLE(NAVIGATOR_BUILDTYPE) feature define. See:
>>> https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=88358
>>> http://html.spec.whatwg.org/#navigator
>> 
>> What is the rationale for adding this property on the navigator object
>> instead of the chrome object we also expose if your'e not expecting this
>> property to be ever standarized?
> 
> Generally, we avoid implementing web visible features via the "chrome"
> object because that makes them Chrome-proprietary.  In this case, it
> seems entirely reasonable for other browsers (e.g., Firefox) to want
> to implement this feature.  By putting it on navigator, we invite them
> to implement it as well.

But the original message said:

> I wanted to let you know that I plan to add support for navigator.buildType (e.g., "nightly", "beta", "final") to WebKit. This feature isn't on the standards track (but neither are a bunch of other similar properties on Navigator)

If you don't want it to be Chrome or WebKit-proprietary, and you're inviting other browsers to implement it, then you should probably speak to them and the rest of the community up front.

It definitely would be much nicer if User Agent was exposed as a bunch of neatly organised JavaScript properties on the navigator object. Of course then we'd eventually have issues similar to what are now parsing errors. Who says a browser won't want to add "alpha" or "release-candidate" to the list above. This is going to be flakey no matter what.

I should stop replying now because I really don't care anywhere near as much about this as I'm suggesting by all my email :)

Dean


> 
>> The feedback the WebKit community at large has given us so far appears to be
>> strictly negative about adding this to the navigator object.
> 
> The mechanism for implementing the feature doesn't really affect the
> arguments that folks are making on this thread.  If we decide that the
> feature is worth implementing, we should implement it on navigator.
> If the feature is not worth implementing, we shouldn't implement it on
> the "chrome" object either.
> 
> Adam
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