[whatwg] Combining the DedicatedWorker and SharedWorker interfaces

[Ian Hickson]

On Thu, 13 Nov 2008, Jonas Sicking wrote:
> 
> Honestly I'm not really sure why the spec says that you need a list at 
> all, other than maybe to talk about GC (which i've many times mentioned 
> I think the spec should not need to "define").

I remembered what it was that I was trying to remember the last time we 
spoke about this -- the case that the spec is trying to define that I 
don't know how to define in any other way is the case where a worker has 
no non-GC'ed communication mechanisms with the outside world (e.g. the 
Worker object is dropped and GC'ed on the outside, there are no message 
handlers set up, and there are no other ports around), but the worker has 
a timer set up [1] to do some work that can have side-effects. Without 
defining when GC happens, there would be a detectable way to tell that the 
worker went away. We want such workers to keep going until the document 
that they were associated with is navigated away.

That's what the text in the spec is doing. (It also defines when a worker 
should be suspended, for similar reasons.)

I don't really see how we can do away with this without interop issues.


[1] or a pending XHR, or a pending database transaction response, or...

-- 
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