On May 17, 2010, at 12:12 PM, David Herman wrote:
Coalescing requests (for some value of request) could be pushed
down a layer, not specified as part of the ECMA-262 language. This
serves the decoupling requirement. Is it enough? A while ago Allen
wrote about separating "configuration management":
https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/2010-January/
010686.html
Part of this was about version selection, but part of it was about
"assembly" structuring. It seems worth working through this, both
with a real implementation of simple modules, and with some thought
experiments.
Yes, certainly. To some extent the module declaration syntax
provides you enough to do this already:
<!-- my configuration table -->
<script type="harmony">
module M1 = "m1.js";
module M2 = "m2.js";
...
</script>
But it might be nice to crystallize this in a restricted special
form so browsers can reliably prefetch:
<script type="harmony">
module table {
M1: "m1.js",
M2: "m2.js",
// ...
}
</script>
Either way allows prefetching once the type="harmony" script content
has been parsed. But the browser still would have to stall rendering
while that "module table" script tag was being processed, as far as I
can tell. Any later scripts would block too, to avoid using a not-yet-
loaded module binding.
Oh, but you probably meant that the module table form, besides being
sugar, is written in a restricted language that cannot have effects
other than to create module bindings -- cannot do document.write or
document.createElementNS("script") or whatever. In that case we'd want
type="harmony-module-table" or some such, and then such a script
indeed would allow layout to proceed immediately, and not block
rendering.
Thinking about it more, simple modules let authors bundle things
in .js files, and src them with scripts. That's almost enough.
Anything more, we do not want to standardize prematurely. Simple
modules are really about lexical scope all the way up, and guaranteed
errors (early errors, even), and static code partitioning with
information hiding, and of course the lexical-only module-binding
namespace management.
Which is all good. Prefetching and packaging are separable issues, we
should keep thinking about them but I'd hate to try to "solve" them
before considering simple modules as a proposal.
/be
_______________________________________________
es-discuss mailing list
es-discuss@mozilla.org
https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
