ISSUE-70: what to do about window timers?
http://www.w3.org/2005/06/tracker/webapi/issues/70 Raised by: Maciej Stachowiak On product: Window What to do about timers? Some rough options: A.1) Define in an ECMAScript-only way, and assume other languages all have their own built-in timer facility. But is that true? In particular, do they have one that is usable in a browser scripting context? I am not sure, since timer facilities are generally based on some sort of event loop, and the browser controls the event loop in this case. A.2) Define using a TimerListener interface which is meant only for other languages, while ECMAScript only actually allows strings or functions to be passed. A.3) Define using a TimerListener interface which is meant only for other languages, ECMAScript allows strings or functions to be passed, but also allows user objects that implement TimerListener. B.1) Invent a new timer API that's more like the SVG uDOM one (but simpler to use, it shouldn't take 4 lines of code to set up a timer callback in ES). Define the existing implemented Window timer methods in terms of this for ECMAScript only. B.2) Like A.2 but also add a nicer timer API for all languages as in B.1. B.3) Like A.3 but also add a nicer timer API for all languages as in B.1. For completeness there is also this: C) Drop timers from the spec, at least for this version. There is also the question of what TimerListener would look like, I imagine a single method that gets some kind of timer ID as an argument, but it really depends on which of these options we go with. There is also the option of making it just like an EventListener, but I don't think events are a good model for timers firing, most toolkit APIs I know of make timers and events separate concepts. This is the one time in writing this spec I have felt the temptation to invent a new feature. Someone smack me back to reality.
