I was looking through the WebStorage and HTML 5 specs regarding the storage mutex. I have a few comments/questions.<div><br></div><div>First of all, I was wondering why all user prompts are specified as "must release the storage mutex" (<a href="http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#user-prompts">http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#user-prompts</a>). Should this really say "must" instead of "may"? IIRC (I couldn't find the original thread, unfortunately) this was added because of deadlock concerns. It seems like there might be some UA implementation specific ways this could deadlock and there is the question of whether we'd want an alert() while holding the lock to block other execution requiring the lock, but I don't see why the language should be "must". For Chromium, I don't think we'll need to release the lock for any of these, unless there's some deadlock scenario I'm missing here.</div>
<div><br></div><div>It's also worth noting that Chromium is probably going to need to drop the storage mutex for most if not all plugin related calls due to deadlock conditions. If there were some place to mention this as a "may" type thing, it'd be good, but I realize it's probably out of scope for HTML 5.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Given that different UAs are probably going to have other scenarios where they have to drop the lock (some of them may even be purely implementational issues), should we add some way for us to notify scripts the lock was dropped? A normal event isn't going to be of much use, since it'll fire after the scripts execution ends (so the lock would have been dropped by then anyway). A boolean doesn't seem super useful, but it's better than nothing and could help debugging. Maybe fire an exception? Are there other options?</div>
<div><br></div><div>Lastly, is navigator.getStorageUpdates() the right name for the function that drops the lock? Why was it changed from navigator.releaseLock()? I assume we're trying to avoid the word "lock", but the reason why you'd need to call a function to get updates is not clear without understanding the concept of a lock...so what's the point of making this so cryptic?</div>
<div><br></div><div>Thanks,</div><div>Jeremy</div>