📝 I find it ironic that the web platform has such a strong ethos of "no breaking changes” but the tools we use to build on top of the web are like "BREAKING CHANGE ALL THE THINGS” blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/backwar... - ThreadSky

jim-nielsen.com • 4 days ago

📝 I find it ironic that the web platform has such a strong ethos of "no breaking changes” but the tools we use to build on top of the web are like "BREAKING CHANGE ALL THE THINGS”

https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/backwards-compat-in-web-but-not-its-tools/

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brianleroux.bsky.social•4 days ago

the fun thing to consider: the web being stable hasn't changed and maybe while the new/early career dev fashion does perhaps it isn't a great criteria for dependency systems. turns out, html isn't actually all that hard, and we can use it with progressive enhancement to build stable frontends

bkardell.com•4 days ago

In our recent Igalia Chats episode on Babel - "Babel still supports node six." 🫡

Yeah it's interesting... It also makes sense because one is libel to break out from underneath you globally without your knowledge and the other gives you the option to be in control of that a bit more.

bkardell.com•4 days ago

Like, the stakes are very different. It's also a little tricky what you call a breaking change and our tolerance for doing it. I was just talking to @meyerweb.com that it might be interesting to have someone on to discuss the actual policy/processes. Maybe @rbyers.net

jim-nielsen.com•4 days ago

have not listened to that episode! gonna have to check it out 👀

rbyers.net•4 days ago

I'd be happy to chat about this, but there's obviously no universal consensus for the web. On the Chrome team I think we've gotten very good at using data to separate low-risk breaking changes from high-risk ones: https://bit.ly/blink-compat.

bkardell.com•3 days ago

Yeah but most of the same kinds of concerns are considered and it would be interesting to talk about examples and so on

rbyers.net•4 days ago

We successfully make dozens of incompatible changes every Chrome release, but most are small bug fixes and aligning to small details of other browsers. 3PCD was our most ambitious suite of breaking changes yet but looks like it's just too hard for us to pull off 😢.

rbyers.net•3 days ago

We don't consider this perspective enough when asking "is this capability better added by browsers or frameworks?". Maybe a key value of the web platform is a promise of stability and long-term support?

jim-nielsen.com•3 days ago

what's that phrase, "they walked so we could run"?

perhaps, similarly, frameworks are unstable so the platform can be stable

rbyers.net•3 days ago

Yep, I love when ideas get explored and proven out in "userland" informing standardization and implementation in all browser engines.

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