[Webkit-unassigned] [Bug 17400] hasFeature Broken (WebKit claims it does not support SVG)

[bugzilla-daemon at webkit.org]

http://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=17400





------- Comment #7 from cfis at savagexi.com  2008-03-03 14:03 PDT -------
I'm saying that Webkit ignore the spec and do as Opera, Firefox and previous
version of Safari do. There are two reasons for doing this.  

Most importantly, a comparison of http://webkit.org/projects/svg/status.xml and
http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/feature.html shows that although Webkit does not meet
the letter of the specification, it supports a large portion of the SVG spec
and therefore returning true from hasFeature seems reasonable (particularly
since Firefox, Opera and earlier versions of Safari have set that precendent).

Second, it makes life easier for developers.  I think most people would agree
it is more robust for Javascript code to check the availability of the features
it wants to use as opposed to guessing based on browser detection.  Currently,
both Firefox and Opera advertise their support for SVG via hasFeature, although
debatably both implementations are not as complete as WebKit's.  

The alternative, is to take a hard-line and say that no browsers support SVG
(and that Firefox and Opera are wrong).  But in the real-world, that would
force developers to use browser detection, check the version number, and act
accordingly.  That seems like an uglier approach, and just adds to the
differences between browsers that make Javascript development more difficult
than it should be.  In addition, because of the complexity of the SVG
specification, you could end up in a situation where browsers could never claim
to support SVG, although they implement the vast majority of the spec. I don't
see how that helps anyone in the end.

Thanks again for looking into this....


-- 
Configure bugmail: http://bugs.webkit.org/userprefs.cgi?tab=email
------- You are receiving this mail because: -------
You are the assignee for the bug, or are watching the assignee.