Hola Sole!
Thanks for your feedback.
This is somewhat at odds with our aim of making the tools faster and leaner.
I’m with you 100%, and I can see how the project would go completely off the rails if every new feature request was added to core. I think that, at least for know, it makes perfect sense to keep this as an extension.
I also agree with your “using WebExtensions to test the waters” approach. I still wonder about discoverability, but maybe that’s because I was never an extension kind of guy!
Also, it might be the case that your parsing is more benign than the one Firefox or the tools apply, as we might be ignoring properties that are not valid in Firefox.
This is very true. I thought about tapping into document.styleSheets
to avoid downloading + parsing stylesheets again, but this wouldn’t give me access to CSS declarations that are ignored by the browser.
However, when I open the Style Editor panel I can see the full list of declarations, even the ones that Firefox will ignore, so the raw content should be there (and the fact that it’s syntax-highlighted makes me think that it’s being parsed to some degree?).
In any case, this duplication of effort is really a non-issue for now. It’s not really an argument in favour of building this into core, I just wanted to share all my findings.
So… I guess this is where I’m at: this is quite a big project, which is a challenge for me considering the short amount of time I can allocate to it on a regular basis. More than anything else, I guess I’m looking for validation and honest feedback on whether this is worth pursuing, and whether I could perhaps get some help at certain points along the way (e.g. some UX/UI advice).
I’ve been obsessing with this idea of having a browser that is aware of its competitors and flags compatibility issues, and with MDN increasingly becoming the place for Web documentation it seems natural to leverage that. Also, there is a world of possibilities to explore in this space, especially once you throw JavaScript in the mix, start suggest polyfills, etc.
But there’s always the possibility that other people won’t bother trying it, especially if it involves installing an add-on built by some guy they never heard of, if they ever come across it at all.
I guess I’ll wait for some more feedback and then, if we decide it’s worth going ahead, I’ll devise a plan to build this in phases with realistic milestones?
Thanks again for your feedback!