Moving Window and stuff out of HTML5

Dear WGs,
(Ccing public-webapps@w3.org.)

>> 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.
SVG 1.2 Tiny has some of this stuff. Window Object 1.0 WD is a more elaborate take, in hiatus because of no active editor and apparently also of unclearness still covering the dependencies and what should therefore go where to achieve a workable and reasonable suit of orthogonal specs.
I suggest scaling the Window Object 1.0 WD down to what SVG 1.2 Tiny specifies, possibly with some small and uncontroversial additions. This spec could progress to Rec quickly, having been long overdue and implemented since 1990s. Then version 2.0 could use a better approximation of our wishlists.

> To be clear, this list *is* the right venue for discussing the draft,  
> including ideas for changing it.
You also wrote to Shelley Powers:
> In the meantime, please do not attempt to quash discussion of what is  
> in the draft.
The way I understood Shelley, and actually support this position, is that placement of these APIs in HTML5 drafts is wrong to begin with because the HTML5 WG isn't chartered to work on APIs which aren't (shouldn't be) particularly associated with HTML. Window (although a misnomer) is the most important badly missing piece in Web scripting, and currently only in SVG (at least as W3C specs go, and of course unless I'm missing something) can it be used legally (e.g. expecting a property called document on the global object if the language is ECMAScript).

Best regards,

Krzysztof Maczyński
Invited Expert, HTML WG

Received on Thursday, 19 November 2009 21:14:50 UTC