[whatwg] Low Memory Event

[Ian Hickson]

On Fri, 31 Dec 2010, Charles Pritchard wrote:
> 
> Web Applications may have wildly different use cases than hypertext 
> documents.

FWIW, I prefer to consider the Web as a wide spectrum from "document" to 
"application", with pages falling along this spectrum, rather than seeing 
the two as being separate.


> The issue at hand is attempting, in some part, to send a signal to the 
> DOM that a low memory condition exists. This may not happen, but it 
> certainly has strong use cases in web apps.

This is a hardware limitation condition. In general, I think it is unwise 
to specify how browsers are to handle these conditions, because in 
constrained situations UAs are much less able to control how they act. For 
example, on many platforms, when a UA runs out of memory it'll just be 
killed outright.


However, more importantly, for new features it's better to start with 
experimental implementations. I recommend following the steps in the FAQ 
entry for adding new features:

   http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/FAQ#Is_there_a_process_for_adding_new_features_to_a_specification.3F

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