Re: CfC: publish WD of Streams API; deadline Nov 3

| If you have any comments or concerns about this proposal, please reply
| to this e-mail by November 3 at the latest.

While adding streams to the platform seems a good idea to me, I've a few 
concern with this proposal.


My biggest concerns are articulated over two issues:

- Streams should exist in at least two fashions: InputStream and 
OutputStream. Both of them serve different purposes and, while some stream 
may actually be both, this remains an exceptional behavior worth being 
noted. Finally, a "Stream" is not equal to a InMemoryStream as the 
constructor may seem to indicate. A stream is a much lower-level concept, 
which may actually have nothing to do with InMemory operations.

- Secondly, the Stream interface is mixing the Stream and the 
StreamReader/StreamWriter concepts. I do not have a problem, if this is done 
properly, to mix the two concepts (aka most applications will want to use a 
StreamReader/StreamWriter anyway) but the current incarnation is not 
powerfull enough to be really useful, while still managing to be confusing.


As an actionable advice to the authors of the spec, I would recommend to 
have a look to the Stream API of other modern languages and how those API 
evolved over time. Streams exist for a very long time, it would be very 
unfortunate to repeat on the web platform the mistakes already made and 
fixed the hard way in competing platforms.




| Agreement to this proposal: a) indicates support for publishing a new
| WD; and b) does not necessarily indicate support of the contents of the 
WD.

Then, I agree to publish a new Working Draft, but this draft will need much 
futher refinement before being a w3c-recommendable specification.

Received on Wednesday, 30 October 2013 21:17:30 UTC