[whatwg] Ongoing work on an editing commands (execCommand()) specification

[Robert O'Callahan]

On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 12:51 PM, Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+w3c at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 11:48 PM, Robert O'Callahan
> <robert at ocallahan.org> wrote:
> > We can deprecate the CSS mode and leave it unspecified, without removing
> it
> > from Webkit and Gecko. That won't hurt interop since anyone using it is
> > probably UA-sniffing already.
> >
> > If sometime in the future we decide that a "CSS mode" is worth having,
> then
> > someone can start writing a spec for it then.
>
> That seems silly, since it's very simple to spec and implement.  I'll
> just add it to the spec.
>

So it has valid use cases after all?

I'll spec it instead.  I'm generally not happy with just leaving
> things unspecced if browsers aren't willing to drop support.
>

I think this is unwise. Given that some browsers are unwilling to drop
support for almost anything, that would mean we need to spec a superset of
every experimental feature those engines add, at least those that are
unprefixed, even if they're barely used on the Web. It's especially
problematic when the same feature is implemented differently in different
browsers. Then you end up speccing a feature for the sake of interop, but
whatever you spec can't give you interop.

IMHO we should spec features if and only if there are use-cases (not
reasonably covered by existing features), or if needed for interop with
existing content.

Rob
-- 
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