Re: ACTION-23 - Draft a proposal to drop online events from HTML5

On 08/28/2012 11:24 AM, Andrew Betts wrote:

> OK, well, that would translate into this I guess:
>
> PROPOSED RESOLUTION: The CG encourages the standards committee for HTML5
> to issue non-normative guidance to developers as part of the HTML5 spec,
> advising that online events and a window.navigator.onLine value of true
> indicates, rather than that the user agent is online, that the user
> agent has no knowledge of the connection state.  In short, that false
> means the UA is offline, while true means nothing.
>
> If members feel that there is appetite for a better syntax, we could
> instead adopt this:
>
> PROPOSED RESOLUTION: The existing navigator.onLine property and the
> online and offline events should be deprecated and replaced by
> navigator.offLine (with an exactly opposing definition) and the events
> offlineStart and offlineEnd, which will fire based on the same logic as
> currently underlies the offline and online events, respectively.
>
> But I feel it's probably not worth it.  Incidentally, does anyone else
> think the capitalisation of navigator.offLine is weird, and inconsistent
> with the (probably more sensible) event names?

FWIW I recommend just writing an email to whatwg@whatwg.org [1] or 
filing a bug on the HTML spec clearly describing the problem with the 
online event. I doubt that phrasing it in terms of a "CG resolution" 
will have any impact at all; the important thing is that the relevant 
facts are presented. In this case the relevant facts seem to be that the 
event is inherently unreliable for detecting whether the browser is 
online or not, and so it can't be used to fulfil use cases that depend 
on that. If you have use cases where knowing that the browser is 
for-sure offline even if you don't know if it is for-sure online would 
be good enough, present those and then suggest an offline event as a 
possible solution.

[1] The HTMLWG are much less likely to make substantive changes now 
since they are aiming to get to Rec. rather than be maximally 
technically useful.

Received on Tuesday, 28 August 2012 10:01:02 UTC