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

[Boris Zbarsky]

On 1/17/12 7:49 AM, Henri Sivonen wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 15, 2012 at 11:23 PM, Boris Zbarsky<bzbarsky at mit.edu>  wrote:
>>   Preventing _all_ loads for a document based on
>> some declarative thing near the start of the document, on the other hand,
>> should not be too bad.
>
> A page-wide "disable optimizations" flag could easily be cargo-culted
> into something harmful. Consider if the narrative becomes that setting
> such a flag is good for mobile or something.

Who said anything about "disable optimizations"?  I suggested a flag to 
prevent all subresource loads, not just speculative preloads.  Basically 
a "treat this as a data document" flag.

>>   If that plus a beforeprocess event addresses the
>> majority of the web-facing use cases, we should consider adding that.
>
> So what are the Web-facing use cases? As in: What are people trying to
> accomplish with client-side transformations?

Well, what mobify is apparently trying to accomplish is take an existing 
(not-mobile-optimized, or in other words typically 
ad-and-float-and-table-laden) page and modify it to look reasonable on a 
small screen.  That includes not loading some of the stylesheets and 
various changes to the DOM, as far as I can tell.

-Boris