Re: An import statement for Web IDL

On Mon, 29 Jun 2009, Cameron McCormack wrote:
>
> I propose that we have an import statement that takes a (possibly 
> relative) URL.  If I were writing the DOM 2 Events IDL, then I’d 
> write:
> 
>   import "http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-DOM-Level-2-Core-20001113/idl/dom.idl";
>   import "http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-DOM-Level-2-Views-20001113/idl/views.idl";
> 
>   module events {
>     …
>   };
> 
> That way the IDL processor knows exactly what dependent IDL files it 
> needs to process, and there’s no need to assume that the user of the 
> IDL files has to place the DOM Core and Views IDL files with specific 
> names in the same directory as the events.idl file.

I'd rather we just implicitly said that all IDL files were imported.

The problem with import statements is that (a) they require that specs 
actually provide .idl files, and (b) they force a particular file 
organisation structure on implementations. In practice WebKit and Gecko 
both have one .idl per interface, more or less, so they couldn't use 
these import statements anyway.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'