On Sep 28, 2009, at 11:34 PM, Yehuda Katz wrote:
It would be pretty nice if the language bindings of WebIDL were
available in pure ES, where possible. To some degree, that is not
currently possible (in ES3), but it will be a lot better in ES5. I
think it might actually be possible to get a large degree of
completion just using the JavaScript available in Spidermonkey.
What do you mean by "available"? A lot of Web IDL interfaces are
actually implementable in ES5 (at least the interface part - not
necessarily the underlying functionality without relying on APIs
outside the language). Using ES5 as the reference baseline would help
make this more clear perhaps.
- Maciej
This might also be a useful step in the direction that I was hoping
for in some earlier postings.
-- Yehuda
On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 11:22 PM, Maciej Stachowiak <m...@apple.com>
wrote:
On Sep 28, 2009, at 10:12 AM, Allen Wirfs-Brock wrote:
-----Original Message-----
From: es-discuss-boun...@mozilla.org [mailto:es-discuss-
boun...@mozilla.org] 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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Yehuda Katz
Developer | Engine Yard
(ph) 718.877.1325
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