[whatwg] Fakepath revisited

[Alex Henrie]

On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 4:40 PM, Simon Pieters<simonp at opera.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 03 Sep 2009 18:23:37 +0200, Alex Henrie <alexhenrie24 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 1:29 AM, Smylers<Smylers at stripey.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Like other compatibility mode behavior, implementation would be
>>>> voluntary and not governed by the W3C.
>>>
>>> What "other compatibility mode behavior"?
>>
>> IE has a huge "Compatibility View" and lots of additional settings
>> available. Firefox also has some about:config options available to
>> tweak behavior, and Opera has their site blacklist.
>
> Our experience is that one behavior everywhere is preferable (it's more
> predictable, it's easier to test, it's less risk of introducing bugs, etc),
> and we try hard to have one behavior for all rendering modes for all sites
> and for both HTML and XML. We generally only have differences when we really
> have to for compatibility or for spec compliance.

Whether or not you implement hacks for poorly designed router
firmwares as you have done for other sites is entirely up to you.

> In general, users don't use bookmarklets or other tools to work around
> poorly designed pages.

> In general, users don't try disabling javascript.

And in general, users don't ever try to update their router firmware
in the first place. Those that do are likely smart enough to use
Google to figure out how to work around the problem.

> It should be noted that both IE and Opera first tried to use just the
> filename, but independently found that it was incompatible with existing
> content.

And Firefox, Safari, and Chrome independently didn't find enough
compatibility issues to worry about.

>> Ian wants to
>> standardize on the stupider behavior and expects the remaining browsers
>> to implement it. That's going to be a problem.
>
> Expecting Opera and IE to switch back to the incompatible behavior is not
> less of a problem.

In addition to changing Firefox, Safari, and Chrome, implementing
fakepath would require teaching every web developer to use
foo.value.substr(12) or foo.files[0] instead of foo.value. Confusing
and unintuitive behavior like this makes HTML more difficult to learn,
and this added cost of learning should not be ignored either.

-Alex