Comment by foobarbazetc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by foobarbazetc | Hacker News Reader

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Brendan,

First, I'm a huge fan. :)

... and I was with you until the WebSQL vs IndexedDB thing.

IndexedDB is a horrible, horrible thing. It should be put out of its misery and replaced with WebSQL in Firefox.

Mozilla is singlehandedly holding back offline web apps with the insistance on a slow and hard to program -- yet buzzword friendly -- technology that no one actually wants to use. There's no reason what so ever to stick with a dumbed down K/V store when you're not trying to replicate data across data centers.

So, IMHO, you've bought this bit of "WebKit required" onto yourselves. WebSQL is the only production ready offline web app technology available today.

Take it from someone who offline enabled one of the biggest web apps on the web: I'd rather leave out offline entirely than code IndexedDB.

Considering that Apple will never support it, it's pretty much dead. And I feel that Mozilla is really on the losing end of this particular battle.

TL:DR; Please support WebSQL in Firefox. :)

Maybe IndexedDB is bad. I'm withholding judgment. That's not the point, and your demurral on that particular example should not make you reject my entire argument. WebSQL is not standards-track, period. Whether it should somehow get back on the standards track, let's debate elsewhere.

We could go awry on H.264 vs. VP8 too (I'm not religious), but note how Chrome has best of both worlds, including paying the gangster fee (MPEG-LA license). Not exactly "open".

The minor point for this discussion is that works-in-WebKit happens, but mostly unintentionally or out of rank laziness on content authors' parts. It may even (as you suggest and I agree) provide a big clue-stick to repair a standardization mistake or pox-on-both-houses-try-again situation.

Meanwhile, and this is the major point: works-best/only-in-Chrome looks like an intentional marketing game, backed by a nine-figure budget. Big difference there.

How should we deal with the mandatory dependency on a particular major/minor/patchlevel version of SQLite? That seems bad to standardize on.

I personally think there's definitely room for a SQL database API built into the browser, but Mozilla did have a point. It should be something a little bit better specified than that.

Also, it's not singlehanded -- IE refused to support Web SQL as well IIRC, and they aren't going away anytime soon.

Thanks, that's worth reiterating: IE wasn't buying. Alas they didn't get IndexedDB done for IE9. And, just because WebSQL wouldn't fly does not make IndexedDB the one and only winner. We need to revisit this whole messy area.

did anyone on the standard bodies (from MSFT?) suggest LINQ framework as a WebSQL "replacement" ?

it makes a lot of sense IMHO. it abstracts away dependency on exact SQLite version, but preserves a familiar SQL-like mental model. it is stable, mature, well understood and widely deployed/used (god i sound like a shill.. ;)

and has the added benefit that it can be implemented in two different flavours: as a standard JavaScript (ES3) library on top of WebSQL (or SQLite in Gecko), or as a first-class language extension with syntax sugar similar/related to array comprehensions (from JS1.7/Harmony/ES6)..

check out the two code samples, and a list of language extension (all feeling right at home in JS): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_Integrated_Query#Langu...

if it wasn't proposed, can someone from WHATWG (like you Brendan ;) politely ask Microsoft to "contribute" any related intellectual property to W3C? how likely do you think would it be for AAPL/GOOG to accept it? (and if not, it could simply be implemented as a thin layer above WebSQL ;)

MongoDB for everyone!

The first step would be for WebSQL to be a W3C/WHATWG approved standard & recommendation. Until that happens, no browser should implement it.

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