Spec is sometimes string, sometimes array

[SachaG]

It seems like the spec field can either be a string or an array? Maybe that's on purpose, but I just wanted to point out that this can be a little inconvenient for typed APIs such as GraphQL. Could it be standardized to always be an array?

[captainbrosset]

I agree that this is inconvenient. In the explorer, I've had to add some code to always make it an array: https://github.com/web-platform-dx/web-features-explorer/blob/main/.eleventy.js#L59-L64

[SachaG]

Yeah that's also what I did for now.

[ddbeck]

Two consumer complaints. To me, that sounds like justification enough to make it always an array.

For background, I think we did it mostly as a convenience to authors. Now that we have a build step anyway, there's no reason we can't make the type consistently string[] at build time.

I think, with the next breaking version, we ought to do this for all the string | [string, string, ...string[]] fields:

• spec
• group
• snapshot
• caniuse

[SachaG]

I think group has the same issue?

[jgraham]

FWIW I also ran into this and had to write a similar string-or-array-to-array helper, so I'm also in favour of this change. Arguably it's non-breaking (I suppose someone might be relying on arrays always being length > 1 but it seems at least a little bit unlikley).