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Comment by ecshafer | Hacker News Reader

Why is this not being pushed to become part of the web spec first? That seems more reasonable than pushing a feature with the possibility of breaking pages that are spec compliant.

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It will. The specification process needs to be informed by implementation and experimentation. When implementing a feature we'll learn all sorts of things and hit bumps that will help guide the design. Once we have a working implementation, it helps to be able to use it to answer things like:

- How does this perform on existing pages - How does this feel from a user perspective - How can I write pages that user this

Specification-up-front is very theoretical in the absence of an implementation. IMHO, where it's (rarely) happened in practice, the specification is often unimplemented. The value of a specification is that it allows other browser vendors to add an interoperable implementation.

Again, I'd like to stress, this is in the very early-stage experimental phase. We aren't dropping a feature that'll break the existing web.

Edit: To clarify, "implementation" does not necessarily mean shipped to users.

I feel like the actual, underlying issue worth bringing to the standards body is: how do we address arbitrary content on a web page, even when it moves around or changes over time? Aside from these neat Chrome links, this would enable some super interesting features, such as the ability to add persistent and shareable annotations to webpages.

the ability to add persistent and shareable annotations to webpages

Microsoft did this many moons ago. People ended up defacing web sites like the New York Times and spreading proto fake news.

> Edit: To clarify, "implementation" does not necessarily mean shipped to users.

Literally just today we got an article about Web Bluetooth on the front page of HN, a user-shipped capability in Chrome that is still in the Draft phase of standardization.[0]

Beyond that, we have the Web USB API, which is also in the draft phase, but is of course shipping to users in Chrome, on by default.[1]

Beyond that, we have HTML imports, which have been rejected from the standard but are still shipping to users in Chrome.[2]

I don't doubt your intentions, but if you think that Chrome is going to wait for standardization on this before it ships, you are not paying enough attention to the teams you're working with. And once Chrome ships a feature to users, the web standards body has basically two options: accept Google's vision of the standard wholesale, or change the standard and break websites that are already using Google's implementation.

I would be more confident and trusting of the process you describe if there was some kind of official commitment from the Chrome team that this feature will stay behind a browser flag until the standardization process is completely finished. But I think some of the reason you're getting immediate pushback to an extremely early draft of the spec is because developers don't trust Google not to ship this on-by-default once it reaches a WD stage.

[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Bluetoo...

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/USB

[2]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Web_Components/...

This is my only gripe. Please work with a spec first, so that the feature flows naturally through to other vendors. Especially because it's changing the way URLs work.

You're going to get people generating millions of these links around the web. That's a long term legacy of hyperlinks generated by the citizens of the web. Although the fallback is obviously pretty harmless, what about a future feature? If this doesn't work out, but some other feature down the line does, suddenly thousands of these links start working in weird ways. Or worse, the feature doesn't happen at all, because of the legacy of broken links. I know that's pessimistic, but URLs are the foundation of the web, changing how they work should be funneled through the spec.

Historically, web specs often start more descriptive than proscriptive. Building a spec without a reference implementation is a great way to build an unimplementable spec.

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