> 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.
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/...