ACTION-126: What is DOM3EV about...

During the last teleconference (2006-04-03) it became clear that not  
everyone had the same view regarding DOM3EV. It would be good to resolve  
that. "Here follows how I see it."

The events specification defines a set of interfaces to be implemented and  
supported by UAs. These are Event, EventTarget, EventListener,  
EventException, EventExceptionCode, DocumentEvent and CustomEvent. UAs  
also need to support the event flow and all that.

It furthermore defines a set of events to be reused by other  
specifications. It defines the interfaces for those events, as well as  
some indiciation of their semantics and how they work, et cetera. For UAs  
to be conforming with DOM3EV they won't have to implement these events.  
Specifications trying to conform with DOM3EV have to define when these  
events are dispatched and how they interact with the language. For  
example, on which elements 'submit' can be dispatched.

For some events, like 'submit', 'reset', 'load', et cetera this makes some  
sense. We don't want to define when 'load' is dispatched...  For example,  
that would require us to define that `var x = new Image(); x.src ="foo"`  
starts loading directly while loading of a style sheet or script starts  
after the respective element has been appended to the document. For other  
events, like 'mousemove', 'mouseover' etc. it might make less sense given  
that these work more or less the same in every language (when presented in  
a visual canvas). I still think that for these events we don't want them  
to be required in DOM Level 3 Events for UAs. For some UAs mouse events  
might make no sense at all. I think that's best left up to the languages  
in question, like  
http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/REC-SVG11-20030114/svgdom.html#RelationShipWithDOM2Events  
does.

What we should make sure of is that the conformance on specifications  
section clearly states what is allowed and what is not so that we don't  
end up with 'mousemove' being incompatible in two different languages. At  
the same time, we should ensure that specifications are not going for a  
slightly different name just because they don't like that the event  
doesn't bubble or whatever. We don't want to end up with four different  
couples of focus events for example. Oh, wait...


-- 
Anne van Kesteren
<http://annevankesteren.nl/>
<http://www.opera.com/>

Received on Tuesday, 4 April 2006 13:33:57 UTC