[webkit-dev] Adding ENABLE_NAVIGATOR_BUILDTYPE to WebCore

[Annie Sullivan]

On Thu, Jun 7, 2012 at 4:41 PM, Brendan Eich <brendan at mozilla.org> wrote:
> Adam Barth wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Jun 7, 2012 at 1:00 PM, Ryosuke Niwa<rniwa at webkit.org>  wrote:
>>>
>>> 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.
>
>
> No, that's not how you invite someone to do something, in conventional
> human-to-human interactions :-|. It's a bit aggro -- if it makes a de-facto
> standard, others will follow whether they like it or not. If it has
> undesirable unintended consequences, too bad. As Dean pointed out, it also
> contradicts the pitch in Annie's first message.
>
> As Annie noted, we don't feel the need since our UA string has some [ab]
> cruft in it at the end, and a number after the letter that's important.
>
> But UA groveling sucks. Could we instead discuss navigator.buildType in some
> appropriate W3C or WHATWG list?

Thanks everybody for your feedback! It sounds like we need to think a
bit more about the use case and whether there's a better approach we
can take. We'll send an updated proposal to the whatwg list after
we've thought about it a bit more.

-Annie