[whatwg] Fetch: please review! (Anne van Kesteren)

[Tab Atkins Jr.]

On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 7:46 AM, alonisser <alon at noal.org.il> wrote:
> some input (I know, I'm a newbie in this mailing list so maybe i'm stating
> or asking the obvious, atleast for everyone else):
>
>    1. for clarity: The legacy chapter should be near the end and not the
>    first chapter, I couldn't understand most of it because it uses terminology
>    from the Fetch Standard, explained later.
>    2.  What is the purpose of fetch standard?  replacing http/html
>    requests? something else? yes I read:
>
>    To unify fetching across the web platform this specification supplants a
>    number of algorithms and specifications:
>
>    but I'm not sure what does that means. since this is a big change,
>     changing the way tjhat all clients and web servers work (maybe this is why
>    the legacy part is so early in the doc? because almost all the web is
>    legacy?)
>
>    looks to me like something that could be breaking the web (xhtml 2.0
>    anyone) And I'm not sure for what benefit? some new url schemes? a more
>    correct and rational http fetch behavior? we already got used the the
>    current behavior. changing this should come with a very good reason. if
>    anything. The rational for "Fetch" should come before anything else.

It supplants a bunch of older specs, by way of centralizing the
algorithms they all individual describe (or, in many cases, fail to
describe).  It won't break anything.

The point is to have a single, easy to use description of how to fetch
resources over the network, which can be used by other specs.  Right
now, most specs inadequately describe all the necessary details of
their network activity, making it hard for implementors to converge on
the same behavior.

~TJ