Comment by Mikhail_Edoshin
5 years ago
I was under the impression that the "by specification" idea was generally tossed out with HTML 5, where the specification started to describe the current implementation. And this was cheered by everybody. What has changed?
The specification describes what implementations should do to be interoperable. As opposed to what someone wishes implementations were doing but has no hope of convincing them to do, which was the major change with HTML 5.
But the fact that there are multiple implementations remains. and it remains a goal that one should be able to create a _new_ implementation by implementing the spec. Notably, this goal was not achievable with the pre-HTML-5 specification.
In the specific case of WebSQL, if someone were to actually create a specification for it that didn't boil down to "run this exact version of SQLite and pass things on to it", that would have allowed for the "possible to create an implementation from the spec" goal to be achieved. But no one ever stepped up to do that.