[Webkit-unassigned] [Bug 43400] Add priority attribute to XMLHttpRequest

[bugzilla-daemon at webkit.org]

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=43400





--- Comment #22 from Mike Belshe <mbelshe at chromium.org>  2010-08-06 14:40:24 PST ---
To clarify on some points for Eric:
* The browser implementation is intentionally left open so that we don't lock browsers into a very specific implementation.  Thus, the attribute is a hint, not a mandate.
* We intentionally designed it to be backward compatible with the existing API, and, it can also easily be removed with no negative effect.
* It's not true that this can be implemented completely in JS today.  In JS, you can schedule a lot of your own requests.  But, JS applications cannot schedule their requests with knowledge of other work the browser is doing, cannot understand network properties like if there is a proxy, if it is a high speed link, a slow-speed link, etc.
* Note that we specifically only applied it to XHR, which is already an advanced corner of the web.  It's not exposed onto HTML for a reason - to keep it as an advanced feature.

I do concede that we don't know that this will be a big win.  I'd highly recommend most websites stay far away from this feature for a long time until it is thoroughly understood.  But I also know that we can't research and test it without getting this API plumbed through.

Finally, just to make sure people don't think this is willy-nilly, here is some history.
* Various teams have been asking chrome for this for some time (maybe a year?)
* We put together a proposal about 3 months ago after we had solid improvement data from what the maps team was able to do in JS alone.
* That proposal went over to the W3C, and had no real negative feedback (as Anne noted already)
* Here we are.

I hope this background is useful.

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