[XHR] Dependencies in XHR

Hi, WebAPI WG-

It seems that there are multiple dependencies upon HTML 5.0 in the XHR 
specification.  As Team Contact, I would like to caution against this 
approach, as the HTML 5.0 specification is a long time from being 
stable, and this hinders implementation (particularly for vendors who 
sell their browsers, and must therefore market them).

If possible, I would like to identify all dependencies and see if we can 
remove them, or move them to a smaller, more manageable deliverable. 
Anne (the editor) has helpfully marked these in the spec, which I 
applaud as excellent speccing best practice.

"The terms origin and event handler DOM attribute are defined by the 
HTML 5 specification."

I believe that "origin" can be defined in the Window Object 
specification, one of this WG's explicit deliverables.

We have discussed adding consideration for "event handler DOM attribute" 
in the DOM3 Events spec, such that a host language can define what that 
means in its context


"Objects implementing the Window interface must provide an 
XMLHttpRequest()  constructor."

Again, see Window Object spec.

"If there is a Content-Type header which contains a text/html MIME type 
follow the rules set forth in the HTML 5 specification to determine the 
character encoding. Let charset be the determined character encoding."

This is not, strictly speaking, a dependency.  It is a matter of each 
host language defining its own value for charset.  Am I missing 
something here?


I know that everything in the spec is normative unless marked otherwise, 
but I just wanted to make sure that none of the references are informative?

Regards-
-Doug Schepers
W3C Team Contact, SVG, CDF, and WebAPI

Received on Tuesday, 27 May 2008 17:00:12 UTC