[XHR]

Dear Colleagues,

The XHR specification has one very unsatisfactory aspect. It appears that
W3C and WHATWG are snubbing your noses at IETF. 

According to IETF RFC 7230 all HTTP recipients "MUST be able to parse the
chunked transfer coding". The logical interpretation of this is that
whenever possible HTTP recipients should deliver the chunks to the
application as they are received, rather than waiting for the entire
response to be received before delivering anything. 

 

In earlier versions of the XMLHttpRequest() specification, this was
possible. The various forms of the "response" attribute (for different
response types) could be retrieved at any time during the transmission, to
get the portion of the response that had been received up to that point. 

 

In the latest version this can only be done for "text" responses. For any
other type of response, the "response" attribute returns "null" until the
transmission is completed. This is a very unfortunate change. There are
applications for which it is extremely valuable to be able to acquire
partial results as the transmission progresses. I hope you will make the
minimal changes in the specification that will allow partial results to be
accessed during transmission for all response types, not just text
responses. 

 

Regards, Gomer Thomas

--

Gomer Thomas Consulting, LLC

9810 132nd St NE

Arlington, WA 98223

Cell: 425-309-9933