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Bug 25658 - Need normative reference for ArrayBufferView type
Summary: Need normative reference for ArrayBufferView type
Status: RESOLVED FIXED
Alias: None
Product: Web Cryptography
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Web Cryptography API Document (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: PC All
: P2 blocker
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Ryan Sleevi
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Reported: 2014-05-12 03:54 UTC by Ryan Sleevi
Modified: 2014-06-16 23:14 UTC (History)
2 users (show)

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Description Ryan Sleevi 2014-05-12 03:54:59 UTC
The handling of the various typed arrays has moved from the Kronos specification ( https://www.khronos.org/registry/typedarray/specs/latest/ ) into being part of ES6 proper ( http://people.mozilla.org/~jorendorff/es6-draft.html )

During the W3C TAG review, it was highlighted that the normative references for Typed Arrays should be updated to refer to the ES6 specification.

Within ES6, the ArrayBuffer object family still exists. However, the notion of ArrayBufferView has been subsumed into the pseudo-object %TypedArray%, along with concrete instances of it (eg: UInt8Array).

The result of this is that it's no longer linguistically possible to refer to "an ArrayBufferView" within the specification. Instead, the closest approximation would appear to be

"an object whose Type(object) is Object and which has a [[TypedArrayName]] internal slot whose value is not undefined"

The interim solution will be to continue to refer to "ArrayBufferView", as if it were a discrete type. However, this will likely prevent the document from entering REC track until suitable language and IDL can be found.
Comment 1 Ryan Sleevi 2014-05-12 03:59:28 UTC
How the HTML spec presently defines it:

http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/infrastructure.html#dependencies

Which declares that ArrayBufferView is simply a type-def of the concrete %TypedArray% classes within ES6.
Comment 2 Boris Zbarsky 2014-05-12 06:02:03 UTC
Note that IDL is global, so since that spec defines it you can use it.

Of course for W3C process purposes you may not want a dependency on HTML.  :(