[whatwg] Fakepath revisited

[Eduard Pascual]

On Sun, Sep 13, 2009 at 11:50 PM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> There are basically only two arguments:
>
>     Aesthetics: Having the fake path is ugly and poor language design.
>
>  Compatibility: Having it increases compatibility with deployed content.
>
> In HTML5's development, compatibility is a stronger argument than
> aesthetics. Therefore the path stays.

I already posted an example showing how fakepath can easily break
compatibility with well-written sites. I explicitly asked for
counter-arguments to it and none has been provided, but the argument
doesn't seem to be taken in consideration at all.
Hence I'm wondering how the compatibility arguments are treated here.
Is compatibility with an unknown-size niche of clearly bad-designed
sites more important than with potentially thousands of well-designed
ones?

Opera has claimed that they are keeping fakepath just because
Microsoft claims some sites need it. Microsoft hasn't revealed the
list of such broken sites, nor even a figure about how many sites are
involved. However this group is willing to bend a standard based only
on the claims from a single vendor... not to mention that this is
precissely the vendor that less commitement has shown over the last
decade on the area of web standards implementation.

In my opinion, this is exactly the same as spitting on the face of
everyone who has ever put an effort on building an interoperable
website.
If there is a real compatibility issue, a claim that is currently held
only by Microsoft, bring some factual data about it. Otherwise,
including fakepath is equivalent to stupidifying the language
(probably at the expense of breaking currently "good" sites), based
only on a single vendor stating its unwillingness to implement the
non-stupid alternative.

Regards,
Eduard Pascual