Brian Hogan: I am getting really, really tired of Mozilla screwing up the HTML5 specification. First it’s video, and now "we’re never supporting Web SQL"
By video, I’m assuming that Brian is referring to the fact that Mozilla does not plan to implement H.264. With respect to Web SQL, what would be needed is for somebody to define an interoperable dialect of SQL which would be support multiple interoperable implementations.
Brian Hogan: I am getting really, really tired of Mozilla screwing up the HTML5 specification. First it’s video, and now "we’re never supporting Web SQL"
By video, I’m assuming that Brian is referring to the fact that Mozilla does not plan to implement H.264. The story on H.264 is still a bit complicated. I’ll also add that the full story on video includes WebM, Ogg Theora, and even Flash and Silverlight, at least as fallbacks.
With respect to Web SQL, what would be needed is for somebody to define an interoperable dialect of SQL which would be support multiple interoperable implementations. Statements like User agents must implement the SQL dialect supported by Sqlite 3.6.19 will never fly. Additionally, not everybody agrees that stringifying SQL statements is JavaScript is desirable.
If your data structures have changed significantly, you still need to migrate the persisted data, which is typically more tedious and error-prone in schema-less storage because the storage backend provides no tools for it.
Not to dispute that schema-less storage makes more sense for client-side storage – it does. But that’s because it embodies a different set of trade-offs than schema-based storage. It simplifies the most common scenarios (primarily the addition of columns). It does not, however, magically remove the need for migration or cure its painfulness.
Complexity in the problem space is like a waterbed, if you push it away in one place it pops up in another.
(Cf. REST constraints vs RPC everything-goes.)