[webkit-dev] Deprecating JS interface

[Maciej Stachowiak]

On Feb 17, 2013, at 3:02 PM, Dirk Schulze <dschulze at adobe.com> wrote:

> 
> On Feb 17, 2013, at 9:16 AM, Adam Barth <abarth at webkit.org> wrote:
> 
>> On Sun, Feb 17, 2013 at 7:26 AM, Dirk Schulze <dschulze at adobe.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Then we should face it. Prefixed content for CSS gradients, animation, transition, transforms, CSS Image functions, masking and a lot more will not go away. This basically means we will need to support them for an undetermined period of time, possibly for the projects lifetime. This will be the same for every popular prefixed feature that we introduce in the future.
>>> 
>>> If we are honest about this we may can prevent future content to be a burden on maintenance and use similar concepts as Mozilla does with runtime flags on unprefixed features.
>> 
>> Just because we want to be thoughtful about which features we
>> deprecate doesn't mean that we'll be unsuccessful in removing
>> vendor-prefixed features.
> 
> I really hope so. Right now it looks like we hope that the time will solve the problems that we introduced. I fear that this will not be the case for some popular prefixed features and requires a bit more of a push. See the 'mozOpacity' interface on Gecko[1] as one example. Otherwise we could end up with the worst case scenario that less reviewers are capable to estimate the influence of a patch.

We've successfully removed prefixed versions of features before. It will probably be harder for transitions and transforms than for some other things, but perhaps not impossible. The first step is getting to a point where we have a non-prefixed alternative, as <https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=108216> does for transitions for instance.

Regards,
Maciej