Hi All,
I wanted to update everyone on the latest plan for moving forward on the
Streams spec.
For a variety of reasons, there are currently two Streams Specs being worked on
- one in the W3C, and one in the WHATWG. Each of these specs have their
strengths and weaknesses, and were looking at problems from different
perspectives.
After meeting with the WHATWG folks and discussing the various scenarios being
targeted by the Streams specs as well as other considerations, we all agreed
that we have the same goals and should work together to get alignment and avoid
having different implementations.
This is an opportunity to get a strong consistent API which behaves similarly
across the various platforms, from browsers to servers. We are excited with the
potential here, because it lets us tell one story.
Moving forward, we've agreed to revise the approach to working on the Streams
spec as follows:
Create a 'base' Stream spec, which we will work together on. This will be
seeded with the base of the WHATWG spec, and we will incorporate various pieces
from either spec as needed.
This base Stream should:
1. Be the lowest primitive that is independent of any platform
2. Be a layer that could make it into the JS language/ES
3. Could be prototyped in JavaScript directly to showcase it
4. Supports the various Stream goals we discussed, such as creation,
backpressure, read/write behaviors, etc.
In addition to the base Stream spec, the remaining platform-specific pieces
which do not fit into the shared-base spec will live in an independent spec.
This includes things such as support in other APIs (XHR, MediaStreaming, etc)
or DOM specific scenarios - (createObjectURL()). The current W3C Streams API
will focus on this aspect of the API surface, while leaving the core
functionality to be defined in the base spec.
Once we've reorganized the components as defined above, we will share out
further details for locations of the specs as well as solicit review.
Thanks,
Feras
