Re: [WebIDL] remove modules

On Jul 14, 2011, at 09:11 , Cameron McCormack wrote:
> Anne van Kesteren:
>> Having everything in the same module seems fine for the web platform.
> 
> FWIW, I agree, it’s a complication I have come around to thinking we can
> do without.

I heartily agree. Some older specs might use them but I don't think that it matters all that much. If it does, we can issue errata.

> One, BONDI folks were using IDL modules, IIRC.  Although I think their
> spec stabilised well before now, so presumably they’re dependent on an
> earlier WD of Web IDL, and thus it’s probably not a big deal to drop the
> feature, aside from the fact that we should focus on the Web and not
> other concerns.

BONDI doesn't exist anymore, so it's hardly a concern. WAC still uses modules but that probably was not a particularly good idea, and I'm pretty sure that they could drop that.

> Two, certain Web platform interfaces have been in particular packages
> in the Java binding, e.g. DOM Core interface have been in org.w3c.dom,
> Events in org.w3c.dom.Events, and so on.  I don’t think this arrangement
> has any particular benefits.  If Java implementations of Web platform
> APIs need to keep interfaces from these specs in particular Java
> packages, this could be done out-of-band from the IDL.

Note that traditionally this has not been fully done using modules, but instead with a pragma. Which is to say, the DOM doesn't have:

module org {
    module w3c {
        module dom {
            // ...
        };
    };
};

but instead:

#pragma prefix "w3c.org"
module dom {
    // ...
};

I don't believe that the Web IDL grammar allows for pragmata, but I'm guessing that it shouldn't be a big deal to find another such mechanism.


-- 
Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ - @robinberjon

Received on Thursday, 14 July 2011 11:12:23 UTC