Hacker News Reader

Comment by thesuitonym | Hacker News Reader

There probably was no discussion about it. Back then you didn't have tens of managers looking to add their input to a project, so if you came up with something, you could just demo it, and unless someone had a very specific reason to reject it, nobody would.

I'm not saying this is the answer, but it very well could be that whoever wrote the function that handles this decided on an underscore and nobody ever even questioned it.

View on HN

There was a recent post about asking for “no”, in other words defaulting to yes unless there’s an objection before a deadline. I like that model.

I am making extensive use of deadlined passive approval for decision I consider non-contentious. For everything else I set up meetings. I don't believe in async review of contentious decisions.

and really this should be the path: define a new convention, then standardized after - if it's needed (spoiler: probably not going to need it). This is definitely not perfect; it's incredibly painful to retrofit standards, but I'm not convinced it's less work than creating a bunch of standards no one needs.

Please don’t. In theory this works for some things. But when you have multiple implementations of the browser doing different things given the same code it is a nightmare. A solid well defined spec is necessary in that case.

In which case, the need for the spec should be obvious from the onset. Nobody though that html would be used the way it was used today. But we now know the same things as they knew back then, meaning that we do not know nothing, we don't know what will be used and need interoperability. Also, specs means nothing if each implementation can and will do whatever they want (ie. Chrome vs Firefox vs Edge)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com