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Archive for April 10th, 2006

W3C to standardize the Window object

Monday, April 10th, 2006

Following the recent XMLHttpRequest draft, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is continuing its move to define standards for common-in-practice technologies with a new Window object draft. The Window object is one of the oldest, most commonly used proprietary technologies for use on webpages, and the W3C has set out to define a minimal standard feature set for it.

The specification draft notes that dispite the name, which is “Window” for legacy reasons, the object is not limited to visual user agents. The Window object extends the previously standardized DOM Level 2 AbstractView interface and provides interfaces for document locations and time-based events.

Several commonly supported features of the Window object, such as history navigation, dynamic generation of new windows, alerts, and prompts, are not yet covered in this draft. The draft is only a work-in-progress and is expected to be superceded by following drafts.