Do we need an experimental extension naming convention?

[Brendan Eich]

Shades of the first browser wars. This is sometimes the right thing but too much and we get tower-of-Babel confusion and extensions that don't go away.

We're not extending SpiderMonkey in Firefox with things not proposed or already in the harmony: namespace. We are also not yet agreed on shipping Proxy in Firefox 4. It's easy to slap on a vendor prefix, but hard to take that away later, and it degrades usability testing subtly.

/be

On Jul 2, 2010, at 10:24 AM, Erik Arvidsson wrote:

> FYI
> 
> Both Mozilla and WebKit have vendor prefixes in DOM extensions.
> 
> window.webkitNotifications
> window.mozPaintCount
> 
> 
> 
> Chrome added some as well but we use a single object.
> 
> 
> 
> chrome.csi();
> chrome.loadTimes()
> 
> On Fri, Jul 2, 2010 at 09:23, Allen Wirfs-Brock <Allen.Wirfs-Brock at microsoft.com> wrote:
> I just noticed from John Resig’s Twitter stream that Proxies are now in the FF nightlies.   I think this sort of implementation experience is exactly what we need to be doing for features  that are proposed for Harmony.  However, this announcement starting me thinking about what happens when inevitably there are differences  between this early experimental implementation and the final ES-Harmony specification.   How can we encourage such implementation and usage without also risking premature de facto standardization of details that ultimately may need to change?   Can we help JavaScript programmers recognize such experimental features?
> 
>  
> This might be done with a technique similar to CSS’s vender-specific naming conventions (eg, _moz_Proxy) or via namespacing.  In either case, we won’t necessary need to use vendor names.  For example, “TC39exp”, is probably a pretty collision safe global name so you might have for example TC39exp.Proxy.
> 
>  
> I don’t have any personal experience with  CSS vender extensions, but my expression is that they may be somewhat a mixed bag from an interoperability perspective.  Is this the case?  I don’t want to send us down a path that is a folly but it does seem like it would be wise to clearly tag experiments as such.
> 
>  
> Thoughts?
> 
>  
> Allen
> 
>  
>  
>  
>  
> 
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> 
> -- 
> erik
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