Alex Russell wrote:
Window interceptors (as we call them in the browser world) are simply nuts. We simply shouldn't be terribly interested in re-creating this wart.

Having a stable object identity for the window proxy, while navigating the window through a series of page loads, requires this wart or an equivalent one. Browsers came to this design the hard way. Without the window proxy, with only one global object exposed (not just on the scope chain), insecurity or else inefficiency ensues.

You could say the wart is having a stable object identity for an object that proxies to more than one object over time (but not two at the same time).

That is plausible, except that this use-case looks a lot like a membrane use-case. Is there anything in the membrane literature where the membrane wraps different objects over its lifetime?

/be


On Wednesday, December 12, 2012, David Bruant wrote:

    Le 12/12/2012 20:29, Kevin Reid a écrit :
    On Wed, Dec 12, 2012 at 11:19 AM, David Bruant
    <bruan...@gmail.com <javascript:_e({}, 'cvml',
    'bruan...@gmail.com');>> wrote:

        A good question by Anne van Kesteren [1] followed by good
        remarks by Boris Zbarsky [2][3] made me try a little
        something [4][5].
        The WindowProxy object returned as the 'contentWindow'
        property of iframes never changes; whatever you do when
        changing the @src, always the same object is returned.
        However, based on whether the @src is changed, the
        WindowProxy proxies to a different Window instance.


    I bumped into this myself just recently while attempting to
    implement virtualized navigable iframes in Caja — I need to
    emulate exactly this behavior.
    Do you have a pointer to the code for that, just out of curiosity?

        [...] I wish to point out that apparently
        iframe.contentWindow does break quite a lot of "eternal
        invariants" [7] which isn't really good news, because it
        questions their eternity.


    Indeed!

        Among alternatives I'm thinking of:
        * define a new type of proxies for which the target can be
        changed (either only as a spec device of as an actual object
        that can be instantiated in scripts)
        * change the behavior of WindowProxy instances when it comes
        to doing things that would commit them to eternal invariants
        to throw instead of forwarding. This solution may still be
        possible, because it's unlikely that Object.defineProperty is
        widely used in web content today. But this change should
        happen pretty fast before content relies on it.


    The best option I see at the moment would be that a WindowProxy
    refuses to commit, but a Window does. That is, code operating on
    'window' within the iframe can still Object.defineProperty, but
    from the outside every property of Window appears to be
    configurable. This is what I have implemented in my current draft.
    Let's say that the window has a non-configurable, non-writable
    property, what happens to Object.getOwnPropertyDescriptor on the
    WindowProxy? Does it throw? (I would be fine with this behavior,
    but I'm just wondering)

    On the other hand, it seems that in browsers either 'window' is
    also the same (!) proxy, or === invariants are broken, or the
    WindowProxy is acting as a membrane:

    > f.contentWindow === f.contentWindow.window
        true
    I think it's a membrane. The HTML5 spec [1] makes pretty clear
    that the window property isn't a Window, but a WindowProxy.
    HTML5 experts will know better, but I think no one ever
    manipulates directly a Window instance, there is always a
    WindowProxy mediating the access. Of course, the implementation is
    free to optimize this mediation.

    David

    [1]
    
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/browsers.html#the-window-object


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