Re: [whatwg] BroadcastChannel should support structured clones

On Thu, 17 Apr 2014, Jonas Sicking wrote:
>
> It would be very useful to be able to send structured data, including 
> Blobs, through the BroadcastChannel API.
> 
> This is something we've seen any time we've done storage or message 
> passing, that one of the first thing authors ask for is to not have to 
> do JSON serialization/parsing manually. The ability to pass ArrayBuffers 
> and Blobs is somewhat less commonly asked for, likely because binary 
> data is less often used, but seems important nonetheless.
> 
> We can't allow transferring of objects, since you can't transfer 
> something to all listeners of a broadcasting API. But plain structured 
> clones should be no problem to support conceptually (though more work to 
> implement of course).
> 
> We've started looking at doing structured clone support for Firefox and 
> likely won't ship until we have that implemented.

This would make a lot of sense. I think when I was first speccing this I 
wanted to avoid transferring and forgot that you could clone without 
transferring! I see that you filed a bug on this:

   https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=25415

...so I'll track it there. For implementation purposes you can assume that 
I'm going to make this change.


On Thu, 17 Apr 2014, Jonas Sicking wrote:
>
> Another thing that seems like an oversight in the spec is that the spec 
> currently says that BroadcastChannel should be exposed in Window 
> context. We should also expose it in Worker contexts.

I had filed a bug to track this earlier:

   https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=24414

If you want to implement this in workers please do go ahead. I was just 
waiting for people to implement it at all before doing the minor work of 
updating the spec for workers (mostly, as noted in the bug, changing the 
"responsible document" stuff to check for worker event loops instead when 
in a worker, and excluding suspended workers). I've moved the bug back 
onto my radar.


For people following on at home, there's also this bug:

   https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=25414

...relating to the order of events in a broadcast channel, and this bug:

   https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=25413

...wherein I'm about to change how channel names are exposed.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Tuesday, 29 April 2014 23:49:47 UTC