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

[Boris Zbarsky]

Ian Hickson wrote:
> According to Microsoft:
> 
>    http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/03/20/rtm-platform-changes.aspx
> 
> ...the problem was with "a significant number of sites (e.g. education 
> products, several movie sharing sites, etc) and devices (e.g. popular home 
> routers)". The blog post above includes a screenshot of a firmware upgrade 
> screen that has this problem. This is not a site that could be fixed.

Sure it is.  You just need a browser that'll allow you to do a firmware
upgrade to fix it.  Which means that if one gets such an upgrade shipped
before all browsers stop sending paths, things seem to be ok.  I agree
they're not as happy as they could be, but they're ok.  In addition, is
the expected lifetime of the affected device comparable to the expected
time it takes to deploy the new behavior in browsers?  If so, it's worth
it to contact the device maker and ask them to fix things in their next
model instead of working around them.

As far as the "significant number of sites" above... I wonder whether
there's UA sniffing going on here that causes some of these to assume
certain things about IE only.  We've certainly seen quite a number of
issues along those lines: we fix a bug, and discover that sites had
written special browser-specific code taking advantage of that bug.

-Boris