[webkit-dev] Removing support for CSS regions

[Maciej Stachowiak]

> On Aug 2, 2017, at 2:40 AM, Andreas Kling <akling at apple.com> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On 2 Aug 2017, at 01:03, Ryosuke Niwa <rniwa at webkit.org> wrote:
>> 
>> On Mon, Jul 31, 2017 at 1:49 AM, Andreas Kling <akling at apple.com> wrote:
>>> Some time has passed, and it seems that adoption of CSS regions on the web is not gonna happen.
>>> 
>>> Blink has long since removed their support.
>>> Firefox never supported it AFAIK.
>>> (The new) IE has some amount of support behind a prefix, but no plans to unprefix AFAIK.
>>> 
>>> I think it’s time we remove the code from WebKit, and relieve ourselves of the maintenance burden.
>>> This should also open up numerous opportunities for clean-up and optimization.
>>> 
>>> If you know of any reason to keep the feature, such as a major website or WebKit client depending on it, do speak up now!
>> 
>> Since we've been shipping CSS regions for a while, I think the first
>> step we should take would be disabling the feature on trunk, and put
>> that into STP and other ports' releases so that we can easily revert
>> the change if we find out any Web content to be broken when the
>> feature is disabled.
> 
> Hi Ryosuke!
> 
> Unless there is evidence of at least one major site or client depending on CSS regions, I don’t agree that such a slow removal process is necessary.
> 
> IMO doing that would only further increase the maintenance burden incurred by the feature, since we’d have to add tons of runtime checks throughout the codebase.
> 
> I would feel differently if we were pioneering this removal, but since we’ve already seen it succeed in Blink I’m far less concerned.

If we wanted to use extra caution, I think the more useful thing to do would be to add telemetry to an STP build instead of doing a test disable and waiting for bugs. That's likely to get as an answer much sooner. (It won't tell us about content for non-browser apps, but disabling in STP can't tell us that either.)

 - Maciej


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