On 06/10/13 17:25, Dimitri Glazkov wrote:
And, if the script is executed against the global/window object of the main document, can and should you be able to access the imported document?You can and you should. HTML Imports are effectively #include for the Web.
Yes, that sounds like a good description of the problem :) It is rather noticable that no one making programming languages today replicates the #include mechanism, and I think html-imports has some of the same design flaws that makes #include unpopular.
I think authors will find it very hard to write code in an environment where simple functions like document.getElementById don't actually work on the document containing the script, but on some other document that they can't see. It also seems that the design requires you to be super careful about having side effects; if the author happens to have a non-idempotent action in a document that is imported, then things will break in the relatively uncommon case where a single document is imported more than once.
Overall it feels like html imports has been designed as an over general mechanism to address certain narrow use cases and, in so doing, has handed authors a footgun. Whilst I don't doubt it is usable by the highly competent people who are working at the bleeding edge on polyfilling components, the rest of the population can't be expected to understand the implemetation details that seem to have led the design in this direction. I think it would be useful to go right back to use cases here and work out if we can't design something better.
