Re: Lifetime of Blob URL

On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 1:08 PM, Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc> wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 9:59 AM, Arun Ranganathan <arun@mozilla.com>
> wrote:
> >> In addition, BlobError and BlobException sound better because these
> names
> >> are consistent with current "Blob" naming scheme in File API. So we're
> also
> >> going to adopt these new names in the WebKit implementation when we
> rename
> >> FileReader to BlobReader per the spec.
> >
> > *sigh.  Naming continues to be hard.  Not everyone's thrilled with the
> > proliferation of Blob in the API [1] including other major implementors
> (my
> > co-editor included ;-))  but I changed it mainly due to Darin/Jian/other
> > objections.  I suppose you folks are pretty adamant on the Blob* name?
>
> I feel pretty strongly that we should name this back to FileReader,
> for several reasons:
>
> 1. Most people that I talk to dislike the name Blob, much less having
> it spread to things like BlobReader.
> 2. My understanding is that the writer counterpart is going to be
> called FileWriter (is this correct?)
>

Yes, that is what we are currently implementing in WebKit.



> 3. While it's certainly possible to read Blobs with this, it seems to
> me like the far most common case will be to read a "real" file, or
> part of a file (i.e. the result from myfile.slice()).

4. There is one shipping implementation of FileReader
>
>
It just seems odd to use an interface named FileReader to read blobs, which
may not correspond to files.  Consider BlobBuilder, which can be used to
construct a Blob from a string.

Another idea (possibly a crazy one) would be to eliminate Blob, and just use
File for everything.  We could rename BlobBuilder to FileBuilder and have it
return a File instead of a Blob.  Same goes for Blob.slice().  Of course,
the File would not necessarily correspond to a real physical file on disk
for performance reasons.

-Darin