[whatwg] "C:\fakepath\" in HTML5

[Boris Zbarsky]

Ian Hickson wrote:
> The original plan was to just have the filename. Unfortunately, it turns 
> out that if you do that, there are certain sites that break, because they 
> expect the path (and they expect a Windows path, no less).

I don't believe I've seen many bugs along these lines for Firefox... 
can't think of any, in fact.  It seems that the number of such sites 
might be low enough that we don't need to cater to them.

Put another way, the costs of changing this in Gecko seem, to me, to 
outweigh the benefits.

> (I would expect Firefox, Safari, and Chrome to follow suit; Firefox for 
> compatibility, and Safari and Chrome for privacy.)

It doesn't feel that this is an area where we need more compatibility at 
the moment, and I'm pretty strongly opposed to the spec enshrining this 
behavior.

In fact, if the spec did not specify such a behavior it would be easier 
to convince sites to fix their code instead of making bogus assumptions 
about the return value...

> I agree. Unfortunately, sometimes we are unable to make choices that end 
> up with a nice language. :-(

While true, this doesn't seem like one of those cases, to me.

-Boris