Re: IE Team's Feedback on the XHR Draft

Doug Schepers wrote:
> Moreover, this is, in fact, what this WG was chartered to do regarding XHR:
> "This deliverable should begin by documenting the existing 
> XMLHttpRequest interface."
> 
> The question becomes, is IE's implementation to be considered canonical, 
> or is it up to interpretation vis a vis later implementations (FF, 
> Opera, Safari, et al)?

I remember that we started the XHR spec with this goal. However it 
pretty quickly became clear that we couldn't archive a useful subset of 
functionality that was compatible between all existing implementations.

I think in all cases we've tried to be as compatible with 
implementations as we could, but in cases where we couldn't we've had to 
compromise.

> Pursuant to that, is there a way to document the existing behavior such 
> that it does not make existing implementation retroactively 
> "non-conforming"?  Or that does not affect existing content?  I don't 
> know whether or not the existing specification meets these criteria, but 
> I think that would be the best path forward.

I don't think doing that would be very useful as a spec. It would 
basically just be a brief tutorial of the various functions and their 
arguments. Something that there are plenty of on the web already.

/ Jonas