On 2/11/15 9:45 PM, Marc Fawzi wrote:
this "backward compatibility" stuff is making me think that the web is
built upon the axiom that we will never start over and we must keep
piling up new features and principles on top of the old ones
Pretty much, yep.
this has worked so far, miraculously and not without overhead, but I can
only assume that it's at the cost of growing complexity in the browser
codebase.
To some extent, yes.
Browsers have obviously been doing refactoring and simplification as
they go, but I think it's pretty clear that a minimal viable browser
today is a lot more complicated than one 10 years ago.
I'm sure you have to manage a ton of code that has to do with
old features and old ideas...
Sometimes. Sometimes it can just be expressed easily in terms of the
newer stuff. And sometimes we do manage to remove things -- I'm seeing
it happen right now with plugins, which definitely fall in the bucket of
a ton of annoying-to-maintain code.
how long can this be sustained? forever?
If we're lucky, yes.
what is the point in time where
the business of retaining backward compatibility becomes a huge nightmare?
About 10-15 years ago, really. We've just gotten pretty good at facing
the nightmare. ;)
-Boris
