Can a fetch be aborted by the initiator?

[mislav]

The spec says:

A response can have an associated termination reason which is one of end-user abort, fatal, and timeout.

By "end-user" I presume it means the user who's browsing the web page that's using fetch (possibly by hitting Esc or closing the page?). But what interests me is: can the request be aborted from the same code that initiated it, for the purpose of e.g. aborting a request when it's being replaced with a newer request as a result of repetitive user interaction such as keystrokes in an input field?

If not, what are our options for discarding the outcome of a fetch that we're not interested in anymore? Thanks

/cc @annevk

[dgraham]

This is a good question. The only uses of jQuery's $.ajax that we haven't been able to replace with window.fetch on github.com are the abort-current-request-replace-with-new-request scenarios.

@mislav I wonder if you should open this issue over at https://github.com/whatwg/fetch instead of here? That repo is where the spec is being written.

[annevk]

Either that or email the WHATWG list. I suspect we might end up putting a method on Request. It's a bit unclear still what the desirable pattern for cancelable promises is.