miscoded

Over at Mozilla.org they've been working on fixing their load events capture bug. That's great news, because Opera has had lots of trouble with sites that used event capture when they didn't intend to do so. We had the correct, spec-compliant implementation. However, web developers don't read specs. They test in browsers. We suffered the incompatibility problems because sites were written for Firefox's implementation. We've had ugly problems caused by this issue for years, on extremely important sites like AOL.com, and we've worked hard through Open The Web, information and even site patching.

Inevitably, when Firefox fixes the bug they run into those badly coded sites. They start seeing the problems we've had all along. So what do they do? They play chicken! They decide to tweak the spec to solve the problem their bugs created in the first place.

If they go for this solution, we have to follow them for compliance.

To be fair, I do think that aligning a spec to the web can be a good solution, as long as it ensures interoperability and covers the use cases. And the DOM2 Events spec itself is vague. I guess the problem is a spec that attempts to be so language-generic that it avoids referring to even the all-important JavaScript window object, it isn't clearly specified where the window object fits into the event capture/bubble model. They can and probably will argue that their implementation is DOM conformant (and make sure the HTML5/web apps spec lands on their side?).

I'm still disappointed.