[webkit-dev] Feedback on Blink's text fragment directive proposal

[David Bokan]

[Sorry, meant to reply-all]

On Fri, Sep 25, 2020 at 1:25 AM Ryosuke Niwa <rniwa at webkit.org> wrote:

>
> On Thu, Sep 24, 2020 at 8:19 AM David Bokan <bokan at chromium.org> wrote:
>
>> Can you clarify what question you’re looking to have answered? Are you
>>> asking for a new standards position in light of the replies below?
>>>
>>
>>  There are two specific points:
>>
>>  - As I understand it, HTML requires multi-vendor interest to merge
>> changes to specs. Is Apple's position sufficient to start that process? I'd
>> be happy to start turning the spec into PRs but I interpreted the earlier
>> position in this thread more as "not-opposed" rather than support (is that
>> a fair reading?)
>>
>
> Given we're concerned about compatibility and this affects how URL, which
> is a pretty fundamental part of the Web, is interpreted, it's fair to say
> we're not ready to endorse such a motion.
>

Ok, thanks for the feedback. Is the compatibility issue the only/main
sticking point? That is, if we can mitigate or quantify the compatibility
risk as sufficiently low would this change your position?


>
>  - Would Apple accept contributions to WebKit implementing this feature?
>>
>> Google Search uses this on supporting UAs - user surveys have found this
>> improves the user experience. A recently published extension
>> <https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/link-to-text-fragment/pbcodcjpfjdpcineamnnmbkkmkdpajjg?hl=en>
>> to generate links to text already has over 50,000 users. This is clearly
>> useful to users but would really be helped if we can make it interoperable
>> across browsers.
>>
>
> Given the number of internet users is roughly 3.4 billion, and Chrome
> seems to have ~1 billion users, 50,000 (0.005%?) seems like a rather small
> number of users. I'm not saying that there aren't any user interests and I
> disagree with the underlying use cases. However, the fact this may pose a
> compatibility issue and affect millions of users who are using (sometimes
> very) old browsers to browse the internet, that doesn't seem to suggest a
> good risk-reward tradeoff.
>

The absolute number is small but what I was getting at is that installing
an extension requires discovery, some tech-savvy, and motivation so I think
even that number shows there is demand for this functionality (admittedly
non-representative, but still). OTOH, the feature is in use on Google
Search and Bing is reaching a very significant fraction of the user
population through those channels.
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