shakna 4 days ago

Ok, lets reword that. JS has breaking changes in browsers or node at least once a year.

If the platform can continuously shift, in an ecosystem that rots faster than my veggie garden, can we not have more sensible systems in place?

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  • josephg 3 days ago

    You’ve still failed to give any examples of these breaking changes. Old websites still work great.

    I’ll try again. What breaking changes does JavaScript make? What are you talking about?

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    • shakna 3 days ago

      8 months ago, Chrome rewrote how URLs work [0]. Which, unsurprisingly, affects the `URL` constructor in JS.

      We have had so many APIs vanish from any context to "secure contexts" only. Like AppCache, or workers, or the clipboard.

      Entire APIs like XMLHttpRequestProgressEvent have vanished entirely.

      In fact, there is a lot of obsolete features. Enough that there's a list. [1] You can't use global or source with a RegExp anymore. You can't use the arity property on a function anymore. `Object.prototype.eval` is dead. `Object.getNotifier` is dead. `Date.prototype.toLocaleFormat()` is dead.

      Old websites have been broken. Repeatedly. Or we wouldn't have, say, blogspam on why mixed content suddenly broke some Wordpress systems.

      Yes, these are good changes. They're more secure. However, we're willing to break some sites in the name of security, but unwilling to fix ambiguous parsing for the programmer?

      [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41912354

      [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

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