[whatwg] Fakepath revisited

[Eduard Pascual]

On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 2:04 PM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> files[0] won't work in most legacy browsers. I've added an example of how
> to grab the filename.
Thanks. fakepath is less than ideal, but that at least makes it a bit
less evil. Now good content authors have a tool for well, authoring
good content.


On Mon, 14 Sep 2009, Alex Henrie wrote:
> Then for however long we use HTML, we will always remember that we have
> to work around fakepath because someone decided that compatibility with
> a handful of badly designed pages in 2009 was more important than having
> good design in 2090.
Don't worry. Hopefully, far before that HTML will be so bloated that
it will only be outputted by servers from some sane source format.
Actually, there are many sites nowadays that do something like that
via XSLT (either client- or server-processed) plus their custom XML
dialect tailored to the site's needs. Oh! And most probably, by 2090
I'd expect all the pre-HTML5 browsers to have died off, so we may
simply rely on .files[0] (if we are still here, of course).

IMO, despite being extremelly ugly, fakepath is among the least evils
of backwards compatibility. For example, I consider new browsers
having to deal with stuff like <font> is far worse. I won't say I like
it, actually, I'll keep saying it is ugly, but it isn't really that
harmful. Oh, and who knows... maybe by the time we (or our children)
make HTML6 or 7 all the content relying on paths has died off and it
could got removed (unlikely, but there is still a bit of hope).

Regards,
Eduard Pascual