Re: ISSUE-104: supporting structured clones [XHR2]

On Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 10:09 AM, Jeremy Orlow <jorlow@chromium.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 7:25 AM, Web Applications Working Group Issue
> Tracker <sysbot+tracker@w3.org> wrote:
>>
>> ISSUE-104: supporting structured clones [XHR2]
>>
>> http://www.w3.org/2008/webapps/track/issues/104
>>
>> Raised by: Anne van Kesteren
>> On product: XHR2
>>
>> It would be nice to support the HTML5 concept of structured clones for
>> both sending and receiving. Prerequisite of that is getting a serialization
>> format defined and preferably some kind of media type for it. (I think this
>> would be better than supporting JSON.)
>
> I can't access the issue tracker, so I'm replying here.
> What's the use case for this?  As far as I can tell, everything that
> Structured Clones support is either 1) easy to serialize into JSON, 2)
> expensive to serialize, or 3) silly to serialize.
> An example of 2 would be ImageData.  An example of 3 would be RegEx's.  File
> and FileData would fit either in 2 or 3 depending on how you implemented
> them.
> My point is that I don't see a strong reason why Structured Clones would be
> useful outside of the browser.  And thus I'm not sure it's worth the effort
> to create a standardized way of serializing it.
> But maybe I'm missing something?

Yeah, I'm not entirely convinced of structured clones as a network
format either. The one use-case beyond JSON i can see is Files and
FileData. I'm sort of thinking that we should support only that.

/ Jonas

Received on Friday, 25 September 2009 17:36:28 UTC