[whatwg] XMLHttpRequest
Ian -- Thanks for your comment on my blog, drawing my attention to the WhatWG spec for XMLHttpRequest. I like the fact that you've explicitly stated that getResponseHeader/s() and responseText return whatever is available so far in readyState 3. On a related note, your spec is unambiguous that onreadystatechange() is never to be called unless readyState actually changes. It may be myth, but I was under the impression that existing implementations might call onreadystatechange repeatedly for state 3, to indicate download progress... This behavior (if it is actually implemented) is useful to display a loading... animation and give the end user feedback about the status of a long download. Did you consider this and purposely reject it? I know that the common XMLHttpRequest use case is for small downloads, so this would not be all that commonly used... But if you decide to allow multiple calls to the event handler for state 3, I suppose it would be useful to add a bytesReceived property to the object... David Flanagan
[whatwg] XMLHttpRequest readyState==3
Ian, This is a followup to my previous message. If onreadystatechange is guaranteed to be called only once for readyState 3, then I don't see much point in making responseText available in this state. It seems like it will encourage the use of window.setTimeout() to poll the responseText property looking for new stuff... If you think that programmers might be interested looking at partial responses, then maybe you should call onreadystatechange each time a new chunk of the response becomes available. Furthermore, the ambiguity of the headers is a little problematic. If you query a header and get null in response, you don't know if it is because that header was not in the first packet and is yet to come or if it simply does not exist. I suppose you could check the length of responseText to determine whether all headers have been downloaded yet or not. But I'd say that there ought to be some more explicit way to determine whether all headers have been received. If responseText is being parsed out and made available on readyState 3, then it seems to me that you ought to just go ahead and say that state 3 means that all headers have been received and that the response body is being loaded... Here's something else to think about: if the server's entire response arrives in a single packet, can the UA skip state 3 and jump directly to state 4? Or is there a guarantee that onreadystatechange will be invoked for each state? David
[whatwg] W3C's Rich Web Client Activity and Web Application W/G
Dear whatwg folks, At last W3C announced a charter of Web Application W/G and Rich Web Client Activity Proposal. As you know, this activitiy will be started in September, 2005. According to charter, they included standardzation of all RIA technology (XUL, XAML, MXML, XBL and APIs) and combination with server programming (ECMAScript including Ajax, C#, Ruby etc.) And this working group consists of Format Task Force, API Task Force and Common deliverables. They have a plan of Ajax standardization with DOM w/g. How about this action? I wonder whatwg's action to this activity. Channy Mozilla Korean Community http://www.mozilla.or.kr
