Jonas Sicking wrote: > Anne van Kesteren wrote: > > On Fri, 05 Sep 2008 02:36:58 +0200, Jonas Sicking > > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> 1. A timeout property like the one on microsofts XDR. I > >> haven't looked into the specifics of XDRs property, but > >> I would think that an 'abort' event should fire as well > >> as readystate transitioning to something if the timeout > >> is reached. > > > > What's wrong with using setTimeout? > > Doesn't work with synchronous requests. Or at least sort of. > It's somewhat undefined if timers and UI events should fire > during synchronous XHR loads, but it seems like a lot of > people expect at least timers not to. So for this I'm > assuming that that is the case. > > (If anyone is interested, FF2 did not fire timers, FF3 does) > > Timeouts are especially import during synchronous requests > since they block the UI, so you don't want to do that for too > long periods of time.
I agree with Jonas that this is an important addition to XHR, in particular for sync requests as setTimeout usually can't be used. (IIRC I suggested timeouts quite some time ago for the XHR2 activity.) Talking about Microsoft, there is already API for XHR timeout in IE8, see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc304105(VS.85).aspx Would it be possible to standardize a default timeout as well, to improve legacy content that are currently risking to hang "forever" in sync requests, or would that be taking too high a risk with backwards compatibility? It might be good to define how conformant implementations should behave wrt to timeouts and other events during a synchronous request. And it would be interesting to hear some discussion about ui updating/redrawing as that could f ex enable things like "ajax spinner" gifs being animated during a sync request. Best regards Mike Wilson