[whatwg] XML data islands related question

[Charles McCathie Nevile]

On Thu, 08 Aug 2013 01:08:54 +0400, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:

> On Tue, 6 Aug 2013, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
>> 2013-08-06 17:45, Ian Hickson wrote:
>>
>> > > If such an application needs some bulk of text data, it can be
>> > > included e.g. in <script type=text/plain>...</script> but not in a
>> > > separate plain text file (included into the application
>> > > distribution, along with other files) referred to via <script
>> > > src=...></script>. This is a frustrating restriction and makes it
>> > > more difficult to maintain and customize application. If an external
>> > > plain text file could be used, the data content could be separately
>> > > managed (requiring knowledge only about the format used).
>> >
>> > I'm not sure what you mean by "application distribution". Why can't a
>> > text/plain file by included the same way an image/png file is
>> > included?
>>
>> It can be included as a file, but it cannot be used. I can't "read" it.
>> That is the point. I can use an <img> element referring to an image
>> file, but I cannot refer to a simple plain text file (or an XML file) in
>> an HTML document in a manner that lets me process its content in
>> scripting. I can only include it via <iframe> or <object>, but that's
>> different from accessing its content.
>
> I don't understand why XHR doesn't work for you.

I can see why not. Imagine an app that wants to collect all my current  
email when it connects, but is then going to be offline for a day or two  
(or using the sort of terrible connection common in much of the world  
where you have something good for ten minutes, and then timeouts for an  
hour or two).

It seems to me that you're trying to figure out how to make offline apps -  
sort of what appcache was meant to do (and famously did for a subset of  
use cases, but failed for many cases people thought it should work).

I think what you are after is something like the apps that are described  
by a manifest (being worked on in W3C's webapps group), and runtime model  
describing security restrictions and what is trusted (in W3C's sysapps  
group) and general rethinking of how to do what we thought appcache would  
do (the above plus navcontrollers, and other ideas).

chaals

-- 
Charles McCathie Nevile - Consultant (web standards) CTO Office, Yandex
       chaals at yandex-team.ru         Find more at http://yandex.com