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I looked up setHTMLUnsafe on MDN, and it looks like its been in every notable browser since last year.

Good idea to ship that one first, when it's easier to implement and is going to be the unsafe fallback going forward.

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I looked up setHTMLUnsafe on MDN, and it looks like its been in every notable browser since last year.

Oddly though, the Sanitizer API that it's built on doesn't appear to be in Safari. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Sanitizer

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If I need the old functionality why not stick to innerHTML?
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because the "unsafe" suffix conveys information to the reader, whereas `innherHTML` does not?
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Any potential reader should be familiar with innerHTML.
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Right. Like how any potential reader is familiar with the risks of sql injection which is why nothing has ever been hacked that way.

Or how any potential driver is familiar with seat belts which is why everybody wears them and nobody’s been thrown from a car since they were invented.

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yes, and bugs shouldn't exist because everyone should be familiar with everything.
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But if some are marked unsafe and others are not it gives a false sense of security if something is not marked unsafe.
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So we shouldn’t mark anything as unsafe then? And give no indication whatsoever?

The issue isn’t that the word “safe” doesn’t appear in safe variants, it’s that “unsafe” makes your intentions clear: “I know this is unsafe, but it’s fine because of X and Y”.

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Maybe we should add the word safe and consider everything else as unsafe
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Like life, things should default to being safe. Unsafe, unexpected behaviours should be exception and thus require an exceptional name.

Legacy and backwards compatibility hampers this, but going forward…

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Because then your linter won't be able to tell you when you're done migrating the calls that can be migrated.
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Because sooner or later it'll be removed.
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No because the web has to remain backwards compatible with older sites. This has always been the case.
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And break millions of sites?
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You can't rename an existing method. It would break compatibility with existing websites.
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> you would eliminate all usage of innerHTML

The mythical refactor where all deprecated code is replaced with modern code. I'm not sure it has ever happened.

I don't have an alternative of course, adding new methods while keeping the old ones is the only way to edit an append-only standard like the web.

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If you want to adopt this in your project, you can add a linter that explicitly bans innerHTML (and then go fix the issues it finds). Obviously Mozilla cannot magically fix the code of every website on the web but the tools exist for _your_ website.
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I kinda like the way JS evolved into a modern language, where essentially ~everyone uses a linter that e.g. prevents the use of `var`. Sure, it's technically still in the language, but it's almost never used anymore.

(Assuming transpilers have stopped outputting it, which I'm not confident about.)

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Ah yeah, I remember that. General point still stands: in terms of the lived experience of developers, `var` is essentially deprecated.
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I touch JS that uses var heavily on a daily basis and I would be incredibly surprised to find out that I am alone in that.
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for some values of "everyone" and "never".
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Depending on the transpiler and mode of operation, `var` is sometimes emitted.

For example, esbuild will emit var when targeting ESM, for performance and minification reasons. Because ESM has its own inherent scope barrier, this is fine, but it won't apply the same optimizations when targeting (e.g.) IIFE, because it's not fine in that context.

https://github.com/evanw/esbuild/issues/1301

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It for sure happens for drop in replacements.
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Nobody's talking about old code here.

Having an alternative to innerHTML means you can ban it from new code through linting.

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Finally, a good use case for AI.
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Yeah, using a kilowatt GPU for string replacement is going to be the killer feature. I probably shouldn't even be joking, people are using it like this already
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When the condition for when you want to replace is hard to properly specify, AI shines for such find and replaces.
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This one is literally matching "innerHTML = X" and setting "setHTML(X)" instead. Not some complex data format transformation

But I can see what you mean, even if then it would still be better for it to print the code that does what you want (uses a few Wh) than doing the actual transformation itself (prone to mistakes, injection attacks, and uses however many tokens your input data is)

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That can break the site if you do the find and replace blindly. The goal here is to do the refactor without breaking the site.
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> When the condition for when you want to replace is hard to properly specify, AI shines for such find and replaces.

And, in your opinion, this is one of those cases?

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It is because the new API purposefully blocks things the old API did not.
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This ship has sailed unfortunately, no later than yesterday I've seen coworkers redact a screenshot using chatGTP.
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Wouldn't AI be trained on data using innerHTML?
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My experience is that they somehow print quite modern code despite things like ES6 being too new to be standard knowledge even for me and I'm not even middle-aged yet

Maybe the last 10 years saw so much more modern code than the last cumulative 40+ years of coding and so modern code is statistically more likely to be output? Or maybe they assign higher weights to more recent commits/sources during training? Not sure but it seems to be good at picking this up. And you can always feed the info into its context window until then

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This is not my experience. Claude has been happily generating code over the past week that is full of implicit any and using code that's been deprecated for at least 2 years.

>> Maybe the last 10 years saw so much more modern code than the last cumulative 40+ years of coding and so modern code is statistically more likely to be output?

The rate of change has made defining "modern" even more difficult and the timeframe brief, plus all that new code is based on old code, so it's more like a leaning tower than some sort of solid foundation.

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ES6 is 11 years old. It's not that new.
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> "ES6 being too new to be standard knowledge"

Huh? It's been a decade.

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Which is why it can easily understand how innerHTML is being used so that it can replace it with the right thing.
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Honest question: Is there a way to get an LLM to stop emitting deprecated code?
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Theoretically, if you could train your own, and remove all references to the deprecated code in the training data, it wouldn't be able to emit deprecated code. Realistically that ability is out of reach at the hobbiest level so it will have to remain theoretical for at least a few more iterations of Moore's law.
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