[whatwg] Web Apps 1.0 Editorial: IDL Bindings

Ian Hickson ian at hixie.ch
Mon Feb 5 00:02:10 PST 2007


On Sun, 4 Feb 2007, Elliotte Harold wrote:
> 
> I rapidly learned that almost nobody was actually comfortable reading IDL.
> 
> I understand why DOM and now Web Apps 1.0 needed to be *defined* in 
> terms of IDL, but I suspect it would be very helpful if there were 
> normative (or perhaps non-normative) appendices that showed the bindings 
> to at least Java, and possibly other languages as well. This would be 
> much easier for most programmers to read and understand.

Yeah, there's a note in the Web Apps spec right now to this effect. On the 
long run I think we want to swap out the IDL blocks (which are inadequate 
for conformance purposes) and replace them with some formal notation for 
describing implementation conformance requirements of JavaScript UAs. No 
work has yet been done in this direction; I'm somewhat waiting to see if 
the WebAPI working group at the W3C work on the suggested "DOM Bindings 
For ECMAScript" specification before going ahead, since there's no point 
duplicating effort.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'



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