Comment by JimDabell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JimDabell | Hacker News Reader

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> AFAICT, this is a web standard and expected to get buy in from Safari and Firefox before shipping to users.

If it hasn’t already got buy in then it isn’t a web standard, it’s just a Google proposal. Something isn’t automatically a web standard just because Google thinks it’s a good idea.

Here are Mozilla and WebKit positions on this:

> This proposal attempts to solve multiple problems with a single solution. We (Mozilla) recognize the motivation for solving some of the problems, but believe that this is not the right solution to each problem, or in some case a step in the wrong direction.

— https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/1076

— https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/630

As far as I can see, nobody outside of Google has committed to implementing this.

From the discussion linked in the Webkit repo:

--- start quote ---

Philip: First, google slides is written in svg, so that won't change with this. But google docs is using canvas, so they might be a candidate. … they might want to integrate this peicemeal, this API allows them to start to adopt the feature slowly,

--- end quote ---

This reads to me like "Google Docs decided to go with canvas sometime ago [1], found it to be too hard, so pushed Chrome to have a way to support HTML in Canvas. The rest is just post-hoc justifications"

[1] https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/05/Google-Docs-...

What a thread (Mozilla). Thank you much.

> If this ships, this is what we think we'll be facing, but in reverse. Your rendering would become the defacto default. Does this help see where we're coming from?

One side cares about a private, free, open web; the other devs made something COOL and potentially USEFUL (ship it!). Both highly intelligent of course, shockingly different priorities.

The other devs only care about Google and Google's own priorities: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48204981 It also helps that Google is a promotion-package-driven company.

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