Re: [XHR2] responseText for text/html before the encoding has stabilized

On Sat, Oct 1, 2011 at 12:03 AM, Anne van Kesteren <annevk@opera.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 30 Sep 2011 21:41:39 +0200, Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc> wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Sep 30, 2011 at 12:11 PM, Anne van Kesteren <annevk@opera.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> On Fri, 30 Sep 2011 19:26:48 +0200, Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc>
>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Hmm.. I looked through archives but can't find any such decision.
>>>>
>>>> It's not how Gecko works, but I haven't tried webkit.
>>>
>>> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webapps/2010OctDec/0812.html
>>
>> That email does not seem to mention how to determine encoding at all,
>> so I still wouldn't say that that's something "we" decided on as much
>> as what "you" decided :-)
>
> It mentions the conclusion from the discussion when we added
> response/responseType that "text" and default would be equivalent for
> responseText and "document" and default would be equivalent for responseXML.
> That obviously includes determining encoding, which was decided prior to
> that (e.g. when XMLHttpRequest Level 1 excited Last Call and became
> Candidate Recommendation).

I still can't find any messages in that thread that mention encoding,
but it doesn't really matter.

>> But yes, I do now see that the spec draft defines how to do it here:
>> http://dev.w3.org/2006/webapi/XMLHttpRequest-2/#text-response-entity-body
>> which is great.
>>
>> I do however think that steps 4 and 5 should only be done when
>> .responseType is "" or "document". Especially for HTML it seems like
>> it would require hairy HTML parsing, including in workers.
>
> If we change how determining encoding works between default, "text", and
> "document", we should really start throwing for responseText and responseXML
> when responseType is not the default to indicate that is different.

Why? What problem are you trying to solve?

>>> Kind of weird that Gecko does not work this way since this is exactly
>>> what the standard defines. Then again, you often seem to ask questions
>>> already answered in the standard...
>>
>> Would you rather write specs without implementation feedback? I would
>> imagine no.
>
> Implementation feedback is feedback you give while implementing. Given that
> this feature is already in Gecko and you only now appear to have read the
> document... I guess it does not matter much, but I have the feeling that if
> Henri had not said anything I would have had to uncover Gecko not
> implementing the standard by myself.

I'm not sure what your point is. If you're arguing that Gecko has a
systematic problem of not implementing specs correctly I have to
strongly disagree. My experience is quite different.

/ Jonas

Received on Saturday, 1 October 2011 20:10:44 UTC