alt Hacker News> sacrificed to the altar of "web compatibility."
What should they have done instead? Force everybody to detect browser versions and branch based on that, like in the olden days of IE5?
(Serious question, maybe I'm overlooking some smart trick.)
Replies
marcosdumay • yesterday at 7:32 PM
Browsers should version their languages. They should say "if you use <html version="5.2"> or bigger, this is the behavior".
Somehow, the standard groups decided to remove the versioning that was there.
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mejutoco • yesterday at 7:00 PM
Have an optional parameter to opt in to the old behaviour and keep the new correct behaviour the default (without the parameter) seems like a decent choice.
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I agree with the "don't break the web" design principle, but I sometimes disagree with precisely where TC39 draws the line. There is obviously a cost to breaking old, unchanging websites. But there's also a cost to allowing old, unchanging websites to hold the entire web hostage. Balancing those costs is a subjective matter.
As far as I know, TC39 doesn't have any clear guidelines about how many websites or how many users must be affected in order to reject a proposed change to JavaScript behavior. Clearly there are breaking changes that are so insignificant that TC39 should ignore them (imagine a website with some JavaScript that simply iterates over every built-in API and crashes if any of them ever change).