Re: Web Browser Preferences and Internationalisation/Accessibility

On Nov 19, 2009, at 9:36 AM, Toby Inkster wrote:

> On Thu, 2009-11-19 at 07:59 -0600, Shelley Powers wrote:
>> Even the reference to the navigator object is browser specific, not
>> DOM specific. Though objects like window and navigator are considered
>> "DOM Level 0", they're really not DOM, as we know the Document Object
>> Model from previous and current implementations. They're part of the
>> BOM, or Browser Object Model. Most particularly, discussions related
>> to the BOM and JavaScript are not related to HTML.
>
> I completely agree that it's an issue for HTML5 to include
> specifications for window and navigator objects. I've been advocating
> splitting them out for at least a year.
>
> Yes, they're useful specifications to have, but they're NOT HTML.
>
> They could be split out into a separate specification or  
> specifications,
> and HTML5 would probably not even need to reference them.

I agree that it's good design in principle to split the core platform  
APIs (window, navigator, etc) into separate specs.

However, it is also much harder than it may seem. I tried to make a  
standalone Window spec a few years back, and it turns out there is a  
lot of surprisingly complex integration between Window and other parts  
of the platform, including things that are clearly part of HTML. In  
the end, I concluded that the effort was not worth pursuing until  
HTML5 was more stable. I think a standalone spec for things like  
window and navigator would have to pull in the browsing context,  
origin, event loop and history concepts from HTML5. As a result, HTML5  
would have extensive dependencies on the resulting document. There's  
not really a way to split it without cross-dependencies as far as I  
can tell.

My personal opinion: doing this properly is quite difficult, and would  
likely introduce significant delay. If anyone wants to make a Change  
Proposal along these lines, I think it would need to include a draft  
of the separated spec and a full draft or detailed change set for  
HTML5 to be complete.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Thursday, 19 November 2009 18:21:27 UTC