Re: [hybi] Framing proposal with start/end demarcation

[James Graham <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, 5 Aug 2010, Roberto Peon wrote:


> What is the incentive for Mozilla, Opera, and Safari to change their implementations again in the future? When will this happen? 

Competition. If some website works better in a competitor due to some 
extra functionality, there exists a strong incentive for everyone else to 
implement that feature. The result of this is that the modern web platform 
has been stiched together from a patchwork of mutually reverse-engineered 
bugs and features. Occasionally there has even been a standards body 
involved somewhere along the way. Indeed that appears to be increasingly 
common, much to everyone's relief.

Of couse the same force that drives forward progress stops us changing the 
past; we can't take out features that are needed for existing websites to 
work even if they would have great payback over the long term. So changes 
we make to the protocol in the future have to be backwards compatible.