[whatwg] Workers in HTML5 (was: postMessage apply(), pipe, etc.)

[Dimitri Glazkov]

Geoff,

These are all good questions.

I apologize, this was a spur-of-the-moment
write-down-before-it-goes-away post. And as such, it's skimp on the
meat. If anything, it was a good enough nudge for Aaron and Hixie to
release their proposals.

What I did want to capture is the idea of API familiarity to that
could exist inside of a worker, so that the developers operate with
the same (though a subset of) methods and properties as they would
outside of the worker and use the same postMessage API to communicate
with the workers as they would with other windows.

:DG<

On Thu, Feb 14, 2008 at 5:05 PM, Geoffrey Garen <ggaren at apple.com> wrote:
> > Since postMessage API is looking more an more like the Gears worker
>  > messaging API (or better), can we go one step further and introduce
>  > workers into the HTML5, defined as invisible windows with limited
>  > capabilities:
>
>  Why call these "windows" at all? They seem to have no relationship
>  physical windows, or the JavaScript "window" object.
>
>
>  > WorkerWindow openWorker(in DOMString url);
>
>  Can I supply a URL to an HTML file here? Does the file load and parse
>  as an HTML document? Is the document accessible to the worker?
>
>  Since the whole point of the worker is to do JavaScript work, should
>  this string be a script instead of a URL?
>
>  How do I pass data to a worker?
>
>  Is there an API contract regarding synchronization and/or order of
>  execution?
>
>
>  >   // some events
>  >   attribute EventListener onabort;
>  >   attribute EventListener onload;
>  >   attribute EventListener onunload;
>
>  Why these events?
>
>  When is a worker considered loaded? Unloaded? Aborted?
>
>  Thanks,
>  Geoff
>