[Webkit-unassigned] [Bug 33644] Aliasing javascript globals to elements with matching name/id is inconsistent with Firefox and slow

[bugzilla-daemon at webkit.org]

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33644





--- Comment #5 from James Robinson <jamesr at chromium.org>  2010-01-14 16:10:21 PST ---
(In reply to comment #1)
> I believe Safari and WebKit have had this behavior for the last 7 years, so
> there’s been ample time for people to have made mistakes in their websites and
> accidentally depend on this behavior in code that’s Safari or WebKit-specific.
> Or code that works with IE and Safari but not Firefox (maybe there is no such
> thing).
> 
> How can we determine which sites will no longer work if we make this change?

Given that Firefox differs here, I do not think this will be a significant
problem.  Authors that care about site compatibility will notice that their
site does not work in Firefox (and hasn't in quite a while).  Authors that do
not care are probably beyond our help no matter what we do.

> How can we determine that Dashboard widgets will keep working?
> How can we determine what other Mac OS X applications will keep working?
> Will the iTunes Store continue to work?

These are all very valid concerns.  The simplest way to resolve this would be
to run this content in a mode different from generic web content and expose
some API to the WebKit library so that programs can opt in to the more
standards-compliant mode as they can.  Managing changes to the OS X provided
libraries is not something I know much about.

Changing this behavior is certainly a bit risky since it has been this way in
WebKit for so long, but I think it's dangerous to continue to expose this
behavior to the web.  It's normally unexpected, nonstandard, and incompatible. 
As time goes on it'll only get harder to change what we do here.

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