[whatwg] Text areas with pattern attributes?

[timeless]

On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 10:18 AM, Max Romantschuk<max at romantschuk.fi> wrote:
> I think it's important not to forget that a great deal of web applications
> are internal applications not exposed to the Internet. In an environment
> like that performance issues with evaluating regexps against a large body of
> text are less of an issue, since the workstations used are under the control
> of the organization the application is internal to.

This is mostly nonsense. I work for a rather large company in your
country. We have standards for desktop/laptop PCs (namely, you can
only use one that you get by ordering from the company's selection of
models), but we also issue each person a cell phone (we make them
ourselves, we're rather proud of this, it's a Sisu thing -- i
suppose).

Our cell phones have software enabling VPN access, so any of my
colleagues can take his/her n95, e71, n97, or n900 and connect it to
our intranet. Sadly, performance issues on Mobile devices are a big
concern to my group and most of the rest of the company, except for
the people who develop the web apps we use.

If you want a better example, I'll note that both Nokia and Oracle use
PAC (Proxy Auto Config), which relies heavily on regular expressions.
Oracle's were so huge that it exposed a serious bug in Mozilla's JS
code. Nokia's are just so convoluted that they cause any browser which
uses them to hang periodically on network lookups.

Just because a feature is available doesn't mean the people who use it
will be aware of how poorly they're using it.
For PAC files from both companies, i'd estimate that it affects 95% or
more of their employees, this hasn't resulted in either company's IT
department changing them. And the problems are serious, having your
browser crash trying to visit the pages you have to visit or having it
hang for a while whenever you try to go anywhere.

Relying on groups to be aware of the ramifications of using regular
expressions, especially wrt speed/performance is foolhardy at best.