On: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

[j-pb]

Never forget that mozilla puts meta bulls* before solving problems.

Their "spec hackers" decided to kill WebSQL, because of they feared that the available implementation was so HIGH quality that there wouldn't be any implementation diversity.

Instead they gave us the indexedDB garbage dump.

Firefox and Mozilla can go straight to oblivion for all I care.

[detaro → j-pb]

No, because the spec did not actually specify enough to allow implementation diversity or even just the available implementation be updated to a new version that breaks backwards compatibility, and apparently none of the proposers cared enough about the spec to do the work of documenting the intended behavior.

WebSQL implementations later proved to be insecure by not limiting the kind of queries allowed, and strictly speaking any fix of that would have broken the proposed specification.

[j-pb → detaro]

Just use the SQLite implementation and documentation everywhere. SQLite is arguably the most well tested piece of software on the planet.

It would have been the only piece of every browser that 'just works'.

But hey having a "spec" on top to all the available documentation is super necessary so that some bloke on twitter can put it into their bio.

Even HTML doesn't have specs anymore, because they don't matter. They are a means to get all browsers to be compatible not the goal.

And Safari and Chrome still ship with WebSQL, so I don't think that "security issue" is actually there.

[detaro → j-pb]

I'm not sure where you get the idea that HTML does not have a specification? It has a very extensive one.

[j-pb → detaro]

Its not a specification though, its a "living standard" a.k.a. we document the stuff we build as we go.

[detaro → j-pb]

A living standard is a form of specification. You can use it to implement a tool consuming HTML the same way the browsers do from scratch, and the browsers use the process to align their independent implementations.

[j-pb → detaro]

Its not a specification though, because your implementation can never conform to it. You can't say "I have a html 5.x" compliant browser anymore because there is no fixed specification for it. You can only have something that is "currently compatible with the other browsers". Same thing you would have gotten with SQLite.