Hi, Anne-
I'm stepping in here to inform on a matter of process. This is not a
judgment on the technical merits of either position.
Anne van Kesteren wrote (on 2/7/08 5:42 AM):
o As per our agreement in the tech plenary the spec will conform to
IE's implementation of XHR (with the exception of constants) and will
be changed accordingly. The tests are important for us and other UAs
as it's the guarantor of that.
We have had no such agreement. I indicated that we have followed the IE
for a lot of scenarios, but there are some deviations.
It is true that there was no formal resolution on this issue.
(As an aside: Sunava, for future reference, it's most expeditious to
request a formal resolution on matters about which you feel very
strongly. This clears up any ambiguity, makes a point of reference for
future discussion, and gives opponents an opportunity to present
counter-arguments. )
However, I seem to recall general agreement about this point among the
majority of participants; alas, this was not clearly captured in the
minutes (though the minutes are good, it's hard to grab general sentiment).
Moreover, this is, in fact, what this WG was chartered to do regarding XHR:
"This deliverable should begin by documenting the existing
XMLHttpRequest interface."
The question becomes, is IE's implementation to be considered canonical,
or is it up to interpretation vis a vis later implementations (FF,
Opera, Safari, et al)?
Pursuant to that, is there a way to document the existing behavior such
that it does not make existing implementation retroactively
"non-conforming"? Or that does not affect existing content? I don't
know whether or not the existing specification meets these criteria, but
I think that would be the best path forward.
[1] http://www.w3.org/2006/webapi/admin/charter
Regards-
-Doug Schepers
W3C Team Contact, SVG, CDF, and WebAPI
