"Basic support" in browser compatibility tables

MDN
#1

Hey hey, I’m here in Paris for the browser compatibility data hackathon.

One bit of feedback, as a user of the compatibility table: “basic support” is ambiguous to me. My colleague Joe tells me that for something like PerformanceTiming, “basic support” represents the first time that that object exists in each respective browser. When I hear “basic support” as a web developer, I would think that “basic support” represents the baseline level of properties / features / etc. that makes that interface useful to me.

Long story short, it’d be nice to have a tooltip over “basic support” which defines what exactly that means. Or, change it from “basic support” to the name of the object.

The new automated tables make it a little better, because they define when each of the properties / methods / etc. were first supported.

Getting rid of "Basic support" in Compatibility tables
#2

I reasonable person might disagree with Kayce’s interpretation of ‘basic support’, but that doesn’t necessarily make the term any less ambiguous.

Instead of a tooltip I suggest just changing the text to ‘initial support’, which I think is clearer.

#3

I’ve always interpreted “Basic support” as “Support for all the features this interface provides that aren’t covered in the other rows”.

But I agree that this is ambiguous. @fscholz, do you think we need to write a definition down somewhere, and provide a tooltip?

#4

That definition seems like a moving target to me since specs update slightly ahead of browser implementations. I can think of several instances over the last few years when ‘basic support’ by that definition would have changed several times.

Maybe ‘basic support’ isn’t what we need at all. Maybe we need ‘initial support’ and ‘feature complete’ or something like that. Though to be honest, I don’t know how to solve the moving target problem.

#5

Aligned with an expression of ‘minimum functionality’?

A CRUD (create, read, update, delete) model? Though I’m guessing even this is not appropriate in all cases.

#6

I thought we discussed this the last time the team met up in London and we decided that “Basic Support” is really “Exists”, meaning that the interface or whatever exists, without implying any further details of what it can do.

Sheppy