[webkit-dev] Removing support for CSS regions

[Geoffrey Garen]

>> Given my concern is the compatibility, not the maintenance cost, what
>> is the evidence that nobody is relying on this feature?

It’s difficult to prove a negative. Impossible, in fact.

Can anyone present evidence of a major client of CSS regions?

If not, I think that lack of evidence — in combination with the lack of support for CSS regions in other browsers — is the best we’ll be able to do to know that the feature can be removed.

Disabling at runtime might give us a little more information, but we don’t have a huge beta population and app developers don’t test against trunk WebKit, so it’s not that much information. Also, adding runtime enable/disable checks for a fundamental layout feature moves in the opposite direction of the goal, which is to simplify the code.

Maybe a compromise path is to disable parsing of CSS regions at compile time, but leave all the code in place, and then remove all the code after a Safari Technology Preview ships without incident. Would you feel better about that than just removing CSS regions right away?

Geoff
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