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
