On Nov 19, 2009, at 1:11 PM, Krzysztof Maczyński wrote:
Dear WGs,
(Ccing public-weba...@w3.org.)
They could be split out into a separate specification or
specifications,
and HTML5 would probably not even need to reference them.
I agree that it's good design in principle to split the core platform
APIs (window, navigator, etc) into separate specs.
However, it is also much harder than it may seem.
SVG 1.2 Tiny has some of this stuff. Window Object 1.0 WD is a more
elaborate take, in hiatus because of no active editor and apparently
also of unclearness still covering the dependencies and what should
therefore go where to achieve a workable and reasonable suit of
orthogonal specs.
I suggest scaling the Window Object 1.0 WD down to what SVG 1.2 Tiny
specifies, possibly with some small and uncontroversial additions.
This spec could progress to Rec quickly, having been long overdue
and implemented since 1990s. Then version 2.0 could use a better
approximation of our wishlists.
Speaking as the former editor, I think Window Object 1.0 actually
specifies too little to be a useful for anything in HTML5. Cutting it
down further would probably not result in something useful. That's
part of why I stopped work.
To be clear, this list *is* the right venue for discussing the draft,
including ideas for changing it.
You also wrote to Shelley Powers:
In the meantime, please do not attempt to quash discussion of what is
in the draft.
The way I understood Shelley, and actually support this position, is
that placement of these APIs in HTML5 drafts is wrong to begin with
because the HTML5 WG isn't chartered to work on APIs which aren't
(shouldn't be) particularly associated with HTML. Window (although a
misnomer) is the most important badly missing piece in Web
scripting, and currently only in SVG (at least as W3C specs go, and
of course unless I'm missing something) can it be used legally (e.g.
expecting a property called document on the global object if the
language is ECMAScript).
That is a reasonable position to take and it's fine for Shelley (or
you) to pursue it. But for now the Navigator object is in HTML5, and
we should continue to provide a forum for discussing it until such
time as we decide to remove it.
Regards,
Maciej
