On Sep 28, 2009, at 10:12 AM, Allen Wirfs-Brock wrote:
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:es-discuss-
[email protected]] On Behalf Of Robin Berjon
There is no old version.
Right, this is v1. What previous W3C API specifications had relied on
was either OMG IDL, or the common lore understanding that people were
familiar with this way of expressing APIs, so they'd get it right.
We're trying to do a bit better than that.
The primary concern of TC39 members is with the WebIDL ECMAScript
bindings. I haven't yet heard any particular concerns from TC9
about WebIDL as an abstract language independent interface
specification language. Since W3C seems committed to defining
language independent APIs, I would think that the language
independent portion of the WebIDL spec. would be the only possible
blocker to other new specs.
It seems like this might be a good reason to decouple the
specification of the actual WebIDL language from the specification
of any of its language bindings.
Defining the Web IDL syntax without defining any language bindings
would not be very useful:
1) The syntax is to a large extent designed around being able to
express the right behavior for language bindings, particularly
ECMAScript bindings. So we can't really lock it down without knowing
that it can express the needed behavior in the bindings, which
requires the bindings to be done.
2) To actually implement any spec using Web IDL, implementors need at
least one language binding, and most implementors will consider an
ECMAScript binding to be essential. Without the bindings being
defined, it will not be possible to build sound test suites for the
specs using Web IDL.
3) The whole point of Web IDL was to define how DOM and related Web
APIs map to languages, and especially ECMAScript. Previous specs used
OMG IDL where the mapping was not formally defined, and implementors
had to read between the lines. Removing language bindings from Web IDL
would return us to the same bad old state, thus missing the point of
doing Web IDL in the first place.
Regards,
Maciej
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