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philipwalton | 7 years ago

Article author here,

I probably should have been clearer in the article. I was trying to strike a balance between:

- presenting what I believe to be a compelling and exciting possible future for the web (especially considering it has a viable polyfill story) - getting developers excited about this future and thinking about how it could integrate with existing tooling

and:

- Asking for feedback on the KV Storage and Import Maps APIs themselves. - Encouraging developer to experiment and/or sign up for the origin trial

It's not an easy balance to strike, and in this case I probably should have emphasized more that this is still in the experimentation phase.

I can update the article to make that more clear.

discuss

order

danShumway|7 years ago

It's got to be frustrating to write something like this up and immediately see people jump to, "Google is taking over the world again."

To be clear, this looks really promising. I particularly like the way that import maps are polyfilled. I kind of wish standard modules were flat-out required to be imported in versioned form, since that would open the door to better API versioning on the web in general, but... whatever, that's what the standards process is for, and it looks like that's something people are at least already talking about.

But the unfortunate side of things is that because of Chrome's history, it's really easy to read posts like this as, "here's a new thing, and btw we're shipping it tomorrow." That's not your fault, it's just what the environment is like right now.

> All your users should benefit from better performance, and Chrome 74+ users won't have to pay any extra download cost.

To me that sounds like, "post Chrome 74, we will have this feature turned on for production sites." If that's not the intent, and Chrome isn't planning to turn this feature on early, then I'm much more excited about the proposal.

domenicd|7 years ago

It seems a bit unfortunate to quote a sentence out of context and then misinterpret it like that. Let's expand the quote by one sentence:

> If your site currently uses localStorage, you should try switching to the KV Storage API, and if you sign up for the KV Storage origin trial, you can actually deploy your changes today! All your users should benefit from better performance, and Chrome 74+ users won't have to pay any extra download cost.

philipwalton|7 years ago

I've updated the article to emphasize that this is indeed something we're experimenting with, and explain a bit more how built-in modules go through the standards process (in general and in Chrome).