- One month later, on Jan 4, 2021, received input: this is not even close to being even a draft for a standard
- Two months later, on March 9, 2021, enabled by default and shipped in Chrome 89, and advertised it as fait accompli on web.dev
- Two more months later: added 2669 lines of text, "hey, there's this "standard" that we enabled by default, so we won't be able to change it since people probably already depend on it, why don't you take a look at it?"
--- end quote ---
The requirement to have at least two independent implementations is there to try and prevent this thing exactly: the barreling through of single-vendor or vendor-specific implementations.
Even though several implementations existed, the API was still in flux, and the spec had a trivially reproduced race condition. Despite that, Google said that their own project needed it and shipped it as is, and they wouldn't revert it.
Of course over the course of several years since then they changed/updated the API to reflect consensus, and fixed the race condition.
Again, the process is supposed to make such behavior rare.
What we have instead is Google shitting all over standards processes and people cheering them on because "moving the web forward" or something.
There's no actual specification for SQLite. You could say "fuck it, we ship SQLite", but then... which version? Which features would you have enabled? What would be your upgrade path alongside SQLite? etc.
That's what Google is essentially doing: they put up a "spec", and then just ship their own implementation, all others be damned.
Here's the most egregious example: WebHID https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/459
--- start quote ---
- Asked for position on Dec 1, 2020
- One month later, on Jan 4, 2021, received input: this is not even close to being even a draft for a standard
- Two months later, on March 9, 2021, enabled by default and shipped in Chrome 89, and advertised it as fait accompli on web.dev
- Two more months later: added 2669 lines of text, "hey, there's this "standard" that we enabled by default, so we won't be able to change it since people probably already depend on it, why don't you take a look at it?"
--- end quote ---
The requirement to have at least two independent implementations is there to try and prevent this thing exactly: the barreling through of single-vendor or vendor-specific implementations.
Another good example: Constructible Stylesheets https://github.com/WICG/construct-stylesheets/issues/45
Even though several implementations existed, the API was still in flux, and the spec had a trivially reproduced race condition. Despite that, Google said that their own project needed it and shipped it as is, and they wouldn't revert it.
Of course over the course of several years since then they changed/updated the API to reflect consensus, and fixed the race condition.
Again, the process is supposed to make such behavior rare.
What we have instead is Google shitting all over standards processes and people cheering them on because "moving the web forward" or something.
---
As for WebSQL: I'm also sad it didn't become a standard, but ultimately I came to understand and support Mozilla's position. Short version here: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/06/beyond-html5-database-apis... Long story here: https://nolanlawson.com/2014/04/26/web-sql-database-in-memor...
There's no actual specification for SQLite. You could say "fuck it, we ship SQLite", but then... which version? Which features would you have enabled? What would be your upgrade path alongside SQLite? etc.