ISSUE-43: change to \"common baseline\"?

ISSUE-43: change to "common baseline"?

http://www.w3.org/2005/06/tracker/webapi/issues/43

Raised by: Anne van Kesteren
On product: XMLHttpRequest

During our F2F in Oslo we agree upon some sort of common baseline for
XMLHttpRequest. This baseline was not entirely clear. In some situations we
agreed upon a solution when it worked in the majority of UAs and in some
situations we left it unspecified (or unspecified for a bit) because it didn't
work in some UAs (send() for example).

I suggest that we accept that UAs will not be conformant out of the box and that
we create some kind of authoring guidelines document that documents some of the
differences between the UAs we're testing in. The specification can than specify
what UAs MUST do instead of what they MAY do or SHOULD do now and change so in a
later version...

This does not mean that we should document more features, like the load and
error event. It does mean that the attribute onreadystatechange no longer
accepts an EventListener so that implementors know what the this keyword
references too (the event). Changing it from Function to EventListener in
version 2.0 would mean an backwards incompatible change and given that this
specification is likely implemented in SVG viewers etc. as well it is better
that there is a common baseline that is actually correct from the start.

So besides changing that back to EventListener the object that implements the
XMLHttpRequest interface also has to implement the EventTarget interface.

The idea behind this is that we _set_ a common baseline for implementors we can
work upon in the future and don't have to break. The authoring issues can either
be dealt with in an appendix or a separate authoring guidelines document.

Received on Saturday, 18 March 2006 12:37:15 UTC