On Wed, 25 Jun 2008 15:47:55 +0200, Steven Pemberton
<[email protected]> wrote:
Thanks for your reply. (We are assuming that this is not a formal reply
from the webapps WG.)
I'm not sure if I replied to this already. We meanwhile published a draft
and will probably do a formal Last Call later on, but it seemed good to
wrap this up.
In general I believe we do not have formal replies though the WG is
expected to vet the Disposition of Comments and participate in the
discussions. In this case however this does not matter anymore.
[... about removing the HTML5 dependency ...]
Our request is that this dependency be removed (or that the connection
be made informative instead of normative) so that all interested
constituents can take advantage of this important interface as soon as
possible.
I don't think this is possible. Feel free to go through the
public-webapi mailing list archives to find more detailed discussion on
this subject if you feel the above is not sufficient:
There seem to be several options:
1. XMLHttpRequest is irrevocably bound to HTML5.
If that is the case then there seems to be no reason to develop this
spec outside of the HTML5 WG, or indeed for developing as a separate
spec.
It mostly reuses concepts defined by HTML5. It is not the case that it
needs to be a single document to ensure some kind of consistency as you
would want with e.g. the HTML5 parser algorithm and script execution.
2. XMLHttpRequest is host neutral, and therefore can be used in
different environments.
If that is the case, and it would seem preferable since there are
several other technologies that are able to use this, then it seems good
to make it as widely adoptable as possible. It seems like there are two
ways to do this:
a. copy the restrictions due to HTML5 into this document, so that it
is free-standing
b. remove the restrictions due to HTML5, and ensure that they are
added to that spec, and let languages that use it specify the necessary
restrictions needed to make it work in that environment.
I think you can use it in other contexts now by defining what the
XMLHttpRequest origin and XMLHttpRequest base URL are. You still need to
implement the relevant parts of HTML5 that are referenced to be fully
conforming of course.
An example of a specification that does this is Web Workers:
http://dev.w3.org/html5/workers/#interface-objects-and-constructors
There seem to be several technologies in W3C that could use
XMLHttpRequest; SMIL and XForms come readily to mind. Would you be able
to enumerate what it is in XMLHttpRequest that is so bound to HTML5?
It is enumerated in the terminology section basically:
http://dev.w3.org/2006/webapi/XMLHttpRequest/#terminology
Kind regards,
--
Anne van Kesteren
http://annevankesteren.nl/
