[whatwg] canvas 2d's ellipse

[Ian Hickson]

On Tue, 17 Sep 2013, Rik Cabanier wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 17, 2013 at 11:31 AM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> > On Tue, 17 Sep 2013, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
> > > >
> > > > I'm not a fan of "sweep it under the carpet" bug handling, 
> > > > personally. It drives me crazy that JavaScript has no type 
> > > > checking, no argument checking, etc. So many bugs that should be 
> > > > caught at compile time, or at least at runtime when the code is 
> > > > reached, are instead caught only after careful testing.
> > >
> > > "Runtime when the code is reached" often actually means "Whoops! Now 
> > > the entire app's broken because I forgot to handle a silly 
> > > edge-case.". When there's an easy and obvious recovery strategy, 
> > > it's often much friendlier to authors to take it rather than force 
> > > them to handle errors.
> >
> > Usually in these cases the entire app is probably still broken -- 
> > maybe with data corruption, even, or with confusingly bad behaviour. 
> > The only difference is that you have no idea where to begin looking.
> 
> Ok, so what if *some* applications would be horribly broken. *Others* 
> will still stumble along or work perfectly fine. I'd rather have that, 
> than a completely broken page.

Dramatically simplifying the situation here, we're saying that the 
available options are:

A: All buggy applications fail to compile, because of static checking.
   Cost to fix the bugs is low.

B: All buggy applications break entirely when edge cases are hit.
   Cost to fix the bugs is moderate.

C: Some buggy applications break entirely when edge cases are hit.
   Some buggy applications have data corruption!
   Some buggy applications have merely graphical artefacts.
   Cost to fix the bugs is high.

I think option A is vastly superior, but since that's not an option, 
option B is preferable to option C.

In reality, I don't think it's true that the Web always goes with C. If it 
did, there'd never be exceptions thrown by APIs, and exceptions are thrown 
all the time by APIs. Indeed, if it were the case that we had a philosophy 
of going with "muddling along" where possible, JavaScript wouldn't have 
syntax errors, or, much like CSS, it would have rules for recovering from 
them and would simply ignore syntactically invalid constructs. We don't do 
that. Instead, we chose the middle ground B most of the time.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'