Re: Removing 'caller' from WebIDL

On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 11:52 AM, Sam Weinig <weinig@apple.com> wrote:
>
> On Sep 9, 2011, at 10:11 AM, Jonas Sicking wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Sep 9, 2011 at 1:50 AM, Cameron McCormack <cam@mcc.id.au> wrote:
>>> On 26/08/11 6:21 AM, Jonas Sicking wrote:
>>>>
>>>> The 'caller' annotation in WebIDL makes an object callable. This is
>>>> needed for legacy support at least for the document.all (non-firefox
>>>> browsers also support it on other objects, but it's not been
>>>> established that this is actually needed for webcompat).
>>>>
>>>> My understanding is that this convention is not implementable in
>>>> Javascript.
>>>>
>>>> I think we should remove this from WebIDL as to prevent the pattern
>>>> from spreading any further. Apparently the DAP contacts API has
>>>> started using it, as has the microdata DOM API. So it appears that
>>>> putting it in WebIDL has made it easier for the pattern to spread.
>>>>
>>>> Prose can always be added to the document.all object (and other
>>>> objects too if needed) as to make them callable.
>>>
>>> I'd like to wait to see what the results of the WebKit experiments are, and
>>> whether that indicates whether the non-HTMLAllCollection callers will be
>>> removed from the HTML spec.
>>>
>>> For the moment, I will give Anne's suggestion a try -- I'll leave it in the
>>> spec, and rename it to legacycaller.
>>>
>>> http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/2006/webapi/WebIDL/Overview.html.diff?r1=1.394;r2=1.395;f=h
>>>
>>> Jonas, can you indicate whether this resolution is satisfactory?
>>
>> I'm ok with this for now, but I don't want to leave things in this
>> state forever without getting feedback from webkit that legacycaller
>> is really needed in as many interfaces as it's currently used.
>>
>> / Jonas
>>
>
> I have landed the experiment of removing caller from collections (except document.all) in WebKit (http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/95203 for the curious) and it should be available in a nightly sometime later today.  It will take a little while to know what the compatibility story is, but I will try to keep you all informed if data comes in.

Yay! That's awesome, thanks a ton for doing this! If you had told me
this a couple of days ago I would have brought you beer on tuesday :)

/ Jonas

Received on Thursday, 15 September 2011 19:33:19 UTC