On 8/6/10 4:04 AM, Philip Jägenstedt wrote:
See, this concept of "a script" is a funny one, given that scripts are
reentrant, and that multiple different scripts can all be running at
the same time, possibly with event loops nested in between on the
conceptual callstack
Well, what we really look at is an execution thread. When a script
triggers a synchronous event handler or is otherwise suspended while
waiting for another thread to finish, we will wait for the "outermost"
suspended thread to finish executing. So, yeah, it's not completely
trivial :)
That really doesn't sound like it maps well to the proposed HTML5 spec,
for what it's worth... Of course it sounds like you're suggesting the
spec should be changed (without actually describing your changes in
speccable non-implementation-specific terms).
Who said anything about infinite loops?
It's one way of a script not finishing.
OK, sure. But if a script s busy-looping, I think we all agree that's
not considered a time when synchronous sections can be run.
If a script is showing a modal dialog, not loading a video in the
background seems fine.
Why? It doesn't seem fine to me at all.
My point is that no one uses modal dialogues
That's not the case, sadly. Gecko had to implement them for compat
reasons, for example.
In any case, modal dialogs are just one place where the issue arises.
Other situations per current spec that may or may not correspond to
threads being suspended in your model:
1) Spinning the event loop while the parser is blocked on a <script>
that's waiting on stylesheets to load.
2) Spinning the event loop at parse end waiting for deferred scripts.
that seems to be it; the remaining cases are pauses in the spec. That
said, I still think the behavior of pause (which you're proposing for
showModalDialog as well, I think) makes no sense; I'd much rather have
the showModalDialog behavior for things like sync XHR, alerts, etc.
It's possible that it can't. It would depend on the exact steps that
run in the synchronous section, but since synchronous sections can't
trigger script it might not be detectable at all.
The most important things is that the following always alert 3
(NETWORK_NO_SOURCE):
<!doctype html>
<video>
<source>
<script>alert(document.querySelector('video').networkState)</script>
In other words, the synchronous section must at the latest be run just
before running an inline script.
OK, let's focus on the issue at hand; I agree that we're more likely to
get somewhere with that than with generalities. What about this case:
<script>
var v = document.createElement("video");
var s = document.createElement("source");
v.appendChild(s);
document.body.appendChild(v);
alert(v.networkState);
</script>
Should this also run the synchronous section before returning from the
appendChild call, even though there's a script active? If so, how does
that fit in with your proposal? If not, how is this different from your
example?
-Boris
