Bug 195818 – Remove incremental attribute and search event

• Component: DOM
• Status: RESOLVED FIXED

WebKit implements the following non-standard APIs:

- Document#onsearch
- Element#onsearch
- the `search` event

Neither Firefox nor Edge implement these.

Blink *does* implement these APIs, but the Blink maintainers are currently
investigating the impact of its removal [1]. That issue includes references
to the `incremental` attribute, but I have not seen any indication of its
existence in WebKit.

WebKit currently has at least one open bug concerning the behavior of this
feature [2].

[1] https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/667
[2] https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13786

[Radar WebKit Bug Importer]

<rdar://problem/48937114>

[Simon Pieters (:zcorpan)]

Tests added in https://github.com/web-platform-tests/wpt/pull/19889

The test results suggest WebKit does support an incremental attribute.

[Ahmad Saleem]

Only Firefox passes these tests:

https://wpt.fyi/results/html/semantics/forms?label=master&label=experimental&aligned&view=subtest&q=historical-search-event.html

https://wpt.fyi/results/html/semantics/forms/historical.html?label=master&label=experimental&aligned&view=subtest&q=html%2Fsemantics%2F

_____

Do we have any strategy to remove these non-standards APIs?

[Ahmad Saleem]

*** Bug 257687 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Ahmad Saleem]

*** Bug 257686 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Anne van Kesteren]

Pull request: https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/pull/15788

[Anne van Kesteren]

I'm checking with Chromium if they're still interested in doing this: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=690143#c25.

Aditya, are you still comfortable with what you said in https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/pull/14701#issuecomment-1579407262?

[Aditya Keerthi]

(In reply to Anne van Kesteren from comment #7)
> I'm checking with Chromium if they're still interested in doing this:
> https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=690143#c25.
> 
> Aditya, are you still comfortable with what you said in
> https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/pull/14701#issuecomment-1579407262?

I'm slightly more concerned about removing the "search" event without a link check, since it could it completely break search functionality in apps that rely on it. Whereas, if we removed incremental without a link check, users could still use the enter key to initiate a search.

I'm still comfortable with removing both from the web, but would lean towards keeping the "search" event with a link check, since we don't know the surface of apps we may affect.

[EWS]

Committed 266068@main (99ff08340f12): <https://commits.webkit.org/266068@main>

Reviewed commits have been landed. Closing PR #15788 and removing active labels.