[whatwg] should we add beforeload/afterload events to the web platform?

[Simon Pieters]

On Tue, 10 Jan 2012 07:34:19 +0100, Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky at mit.edu> wrote:

> On 1/10/12 1:02 AM, Boris Zbarsky wrote:
>> I'd like to understand the client-side transformation use-case better,
>> in particular. What is it really trying to do?
>
> OK, I got more context on this.  The goal of the client-side  
> transformation case is effectively do something like what one can do  
> with XSLT in XML.  Specifically:
>
> 1)  Don't actually render the HTML coming down the pipe.  This includes  
> not doing any loads from it, but also includes not actually doing  
> layout, not running scripts in the page, etc.
>
> 2)  Bind some sort of transformation to it (in this case a script that  
> runs on the DOM or on the original source, depending).
>
> 3)  Render the result of that transformation.
>
> mobify uses beforeload for a poor-man's approximation to #1: it can  
> block loads, but not prevent execution of inline scripts or prevent  
> layout (short of adding "display:none" styles to the page itself).  Then  
> it does various other hackery to do #2 and #3.
>
> I agree that this is a good use case to solve, but beforeload doesn't  
> really solve it.  We should provide a better solution.
>
> For the rest, I just checked and WebKit does set the event target to the  
> node triggering the load, at least for <script> nodes.  I can nearly  
> guarantee that we would NOT be willing to do that in Gecko even if we  
> were convinced that the 'beforeload' event is a good idea in the first  
> place.
>
> The 'afterload' event doesn't have the same sort of problems, of course;  
> it's no different from existing 'load' events in cases when it's fired  
> on an element.  Whether it provides a good solution for other cases, I  
> haven't had a chance to think through yet.
>
> -Boris

http://software.hixie.ch/utilities/js/live-dom-viewer/saved/1297

Might not be cross-browser yet (e.g. Opera seems to run the image's onload  
handler), but should work per spec I think. Well, the load can't be  
prevented if it's speculatively loaded it before the script has executed,  
but maybe that's fine for the use case.

-- 
Simon Pieters
Opera Software