Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
On Jun 25, 2008, at 1:09 PM, Arun Ranganathan wrote:
Doug Schepers, Charles McCathieNevile (Chairs), Members of the WG,
On behalf of Mozilla, I'd like to introduce the possibility of two new
work items for this group to consider. Neither of these is presented
as a fait accompli, although we would like to consider both of these
for inclusion in Firefox 3.Next if that is possible.
1. Worker Threads in Script. The idea is to offer developers the
ability to spawn threads from within web content, as well as
cross-thread communication mechanisms such as postMessage. Mozilla
presents preliminary thought on the subject [1], and notes similar
straw persons proposed by WHATWG [2] and by Google Gears [3]. Also
for reference see worker threads in C# [4]. The Web Apps working
group seems like a logical home for this work. Will other members of
the WG engage with Mozilla on this, via additional work items covered
by the charter of this WG?
Apple is interested in a worker API. The key issues for workers, in my
opinion, are security, messaging, and which of the normal APIs are
available. Right now, these things are covered in HTML5, so I think that
may be a better place to add a Worker API.
We would certainly like to coordinate our work in this area with the
proposed APIs cited.
I'd really rather not add more stuff to HTML5, it's too big as it is.
Ideally worker threads is something that we can nail down in a pretty
short period of time, before HTML5 is out (targeted a few years into the
future iirc).
Like you say, some features from HTML5 should be exposed in the context
of worker threads. I don't really know how to handle that, but I can see
two ways:
1. Make a informative note stating a list of features that we expect
will be made available once there is a finished spec for them, but leave
it up to the HTML5 spec to actually explicitly make this requirement.
2. Have a normative requirement that implementations that also support
feature X from HTML5, makes that implementation available to the worker
thread as well.
/ Jonas
