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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

That argument seems isomorphic to demanding that all software design and feature innovation happen within the W3C commitee process. Certainly that's not how most successful features have worked historically...

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The historical processes boil down to:

1) Single Browser Ideates -> Single Browser Ships -> Time Passes -> Other Browsers Ship -> Standard. This caused delay in implementation and vendor prefix hell.

2) W3C Ideates -> W3C Bikesheds -> Browsers Implement. This causes things like AppCache that work on paper, but don't adequately cover developer use cases and address the needs of the platform.

The ideal process (in my opinion)

1) Single Vendor Ideates -> W3C Evaluates/Refines -> Browsers Implement Under Feature Flags -> Standard -> Feature Flags are removed. This process, depending on the size/scope of the change, should take about 6mo to a year. For a permanent irrevocable change to a cross-browser API? That is mature and prudent.

edit: formatting.

You (2) is not correct. Most W3C specs are edited if not outright proposed by browser implementor teams. And of course nobody anywhere ever prevented browsers from shipping stuff under feature flags (most of ES6 was in Firefox since the days of FF3/FF4, with slightly different semantics, and with an opt-in behind a version flag for instance). Hixie (HTML5 editor, CSS Selectors Level 3 editor) works at Google since 2005 and worked at Opera before, Shadow DOM's editor is Google's Dimitri Glazkov

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