Re: Widget API Set/GetPreferences vs. HTML5 Key/Value Pairs Storage

On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 2:15 AM, Scott Wilson
<scott.bradley.wilson@gmail.com> wrote:
> Jonas,
>
> One level of indirection is a very small price to pay for much more
> implementation flexibility.

But like I pointed out earlier, and if I understand the problem
correctly, your suggested solution will only work temporarily. It will
only work until browsers implement the widget API natively, at which
point you won't be able to write your own implementation of the widget
API.

> It won't hurt developers (the methods are
> equivalent) and it decouples the specifications enough to support different
> deployment models.

I agree that reusing the same API, but with a different accessor
greatly reduces the hurt for developers and implementors. But it
doesn't completely remove it.

> What (I think - correct me if I'm wrong) you've been proposing is to
> essentially mandate that Widgets can only work if the environment implements
> HTML 5; now I like HTML 5, and I think LocalStorage is great, but I don't
> think it should be _necessary_ to bind Widgets to HTML 5 in order for them
> to work - after all, using the existing draft API (based on the Apple,
> Nokia, and Opera APIs) they work already! So why add the restriction?
> Especially as what Ivan is proposing is to remove any inconsistency between
> the Widget Preferences and HTML 5 Storage interfaces.

Well, it's not entirely what I've been proposing, although currently
that might be the effect of it. I definitely agree that mandating that
all of HTML5 is implemented is not a good idea. I see a few different
solutions.

* State in the widget specs that widget implementations need to
support the localStorage API from the HTML5 spec. This can be done
without requiring any other parts of HTML5 to be implemented.
* Ask the HTML5 WG to break out the localStorage API into a separate
spec. This might actually already be in progress, I know several
things are being broken out of the HTML5 spec, and there's likely more
to come.
* Specify an API in the widget spec that is 100% compatible with the HTML5 API.

(the last option seems like the least good since we'd have to track
any changes to the HTML5 spec)

/ Jonas

Received on Tuesday, 17 February 2009 18:37:16 UTC