<br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Apr 29, 2012 at 12:37 PM, Maciej Stachowiak <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:mjs@apple.com" target="_blank">mjs@apple.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div style="word-wrap:break-word"><div><br><div><div>On Apr 27, 2012, at 6:29 PM, Dirk Pranke <<a href="mailto:dpranke@chromium.org" target="_blank">dpranke@chromium.org</a>> wrote:</div><blockquote type="cite">
<div><blockquote type="cite">BTW, the page at <<a href="https://trac.webkit.org/wiki/DeprecatingFeatures" target="_blank">https://trac.webkit.org/wiki/DeprecatingFeatures</a>> seems to be using "deprecate" in the sense of "remove entirely". Is that what is meant? If so, I think it would be helpful to change the wording to "removing features". In non-Web contexts, deprecate often means a step short of removal.</blockquote>
I agree that "Removing features" is clearer and more to the point :).<br>When to deprecate features in the sense of "we recommend you use this<br>other feature instead" is an entirely different conversation.<br>
</div></blockquote></div><br></div><div>Now that I look closer, I see that it says:</div><div><br></div><div><span style="font-size:13px;font-family:Verdana,Arial,'Bitstream Vera Sans',Helvetica,sans-serif">"Deprecating a feature means we will remove it in the future. Deprecation is not meant as a usage metric collection or to assess web-developers' reactions."</span></div>
<div><span style="font-size:13px;font-family:Verdana,Arial,'Bitstream Vera Sans',Helvetica,sans-serif"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size:13px;font-family:Verdana,Arial,'Bitstream Vera Sans',Helvetica,sans-serif">This seems to imply that there actually is a step of deprecation that comes prior to removal. What exactly is this step? How are features supposed to be marked deprecated? What is the effect of being deprecated, if any, other than future removal? Does anyone who was at the session know the answer?</span></div>
</div></blockquote><div><br></div><div><div>I'd assume this is something like outputting a warning in the console. (Disclaimer: I didn't attend this session.)</div></div><div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div style="word-wrap:break-word"><div><span style="font-size:13px;font-family:Verdana,Arial,'Bitstream Vera Sans',Helvetica,sans-serif">My own recommendation would be to just remove features that we've decided to remove. Any data gathering related to potential removal should happen before we make a decision.</span></div>
</div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>I agree that data needs to be gathered before making a decision to remove a feature.</div><div><br></div><div>When we were discussing about adding mutation observer API in the hope to eventually remove the mutation events, we added histogram callbacks in WebKit (<a href="http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/100222" target="_blank">http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/100222</a>) to figure out the API usage (in Chromium port). I also searched through js code in the wild via Google code search (unfortunately no longer available). But we did these data collections prior to removing the feature. In fact, even prior to proposing the replacement.</div>
<div><br></div><div>- Ryosuke</div><div><br></div></div>