Re: [widgets] dropping Asynchronous HTTP Requests and Storage

Marcos,

A consistent preferences interface is crucial for widget  
interoperability; most of the widget platforms surveyed in the  
Landscape document [1] have a Preferences API - and have been pretty  
consistent in how they've designed it. Its not exactly radical  
standardisation practice to take 5 existing implementations and  
harmonize them in a standard - in fact, not doing so is downright odd!

A weak "you can use storage if you're on HTML5 otherwise do whatever  
you want about user's settings" is not a good solution - for widget  
developers this means you're going to have to build your widget  
differently for each UA and its native storage system. In which case,  
there isn't really much point in using a standard in the first place,  
right?

(Actually, what I'm sure many UA's would do in this case is adopt the  
approach taken by Opera, Nokia and Apple as the de-facto standard for  
Widget APIs.)

As for XHR - I don't think anyone would want to seriously drop this in  
real life. Unless your UA really is only designed to run clock and  
calculator widgets :-) Besides, its only a SHOULD not a MUST, right?

S


[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-widgets-land-20080414/#apis

On 6 Apr 2009, at 11:46, Marcos Caceres wrote:

> I had a discussion with Anne on IRC about using the Storage  
> interface and XHR [1]. He recommended that we recommend support for  
> Storage only on user agents that support HTML5. With regards to XHR,  
> the same applies: it would be a property of the underlying document  
> technology.
>
> So, proposal are: drop "Asynchronous HTTP Requests" requirement [2]  
> and remove its support from Widgets 1.0: A&E. For Storage, specify  
> that only HTML-aware UAs support Storage interface.
>
> Kind regards,
> Marcos
>
> [1] http://krijnhoetmer.nl/irc-logs/webapps/20090403#l-36
> [2] http://dev.w3.org/2006/waf/widgets-reqs/#asynchronous-http- 
> requests
>