document.readyState following navigation

Hello,
having just investigated a problem with uploading attachments on  
T-Online.de's webmail, it boils down to an issue that might have some  
relevance for HTML5's definition of the readyState property / document  
readiness calculation (  
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/dom.html#current-document-readiness  
). What happens in IE is that when a window is being navigated away from  
the current document, that document's readyState changes from 'complete'  
to 'loading'. (It would have made more sense in this case to have  
'readyState' as a property on the window, but that's a sin of designers  
past..).

HTML5 has not noticed this, it seems (or chosen to ignore it?), so the  
spec as-written seems to asssume that readyState won't ever switch from  
complete back to loading. The site sniffs for WebKit-based browsers and  
Firefox, because they don't emulate IE on this point.

I'm throwing this out as a discussion topic, now that we've realised IE  
does some extra stuff and found an important site depending on it. I think  
switching back to 'loading' when some load is pending makes some sense.

-- 
Hallvord R. M. Steen, Core Tester, Opera Software
http://www.opera.com http://my.opera.com/hallvors/

Received on Tuesday, 12 July 2011 16:28:17 UTC