Comment by acdha
5 years ago
> WebSQL would have been a spec, could have been a living spec too. Start out with SQLite in all the major browsers, and then gradually have them diverge. Blink and Webkit started the same way. Independent implementation does not mean "implementation of uncommon history".
You need to think about the barriers to implementation: if everyone ships SQLite, developers will inevitably write code which depends on that exact implementation and anyone shipping something new will need to copy it - including unintentional behavior and bugs – to work with existing sites. That is extremely expensive and might lock in something we’re going to regret later if someone finds a behavior which wasn’t intended for this context and has security or performance issues.
Anyone working on the web should be especially sensitive to this since we came close to having the specs for all web technologies be “whatever IE6 does”.
How is that different from what we have now?
Living specs don't give any guarantees, yet they still "pave the cow paths" while keeping ridiculous bugs and behaviours for backwards compatibility, and breaking existing specs for convenience. It all depends on the person dealing with the problem.
Nobody expects compatibility with existing specs, why should they for WebSQL? Especially when it's a living standard.
If those things were true, we would all use the same browser by now and never see new standards, and Blink and Webkit would have never diverged from another.
Open source quarrels basically guarantee a steady supply of competing forks.
Also SQLite wasn't designed to run untrusted SQL code. It's an embeddable SQL engine, not a web SQL engine.
That doesn't make it any less of a solid foundation for a web SQl engine.
It's like getting gifted a car, and complaining that you'd rather have winter tires. So you start building one from raw metals.