WebIDL serializer has been deprecated in favor of toJSON operation

[tobie]

Hi!

We recently deprecated WebIDL serializers. You can now directly specify toJSON operations instead, which you previously weren't allowed to do.

To deal with common cases, we added a new [Default] extended attribute which triggers the default toJSON operation that behaves similarly to how serializers={attributes} or serializers={attributes, inherit} used to. That is, it serializes all attributes that are of a JSON type into a vanilla JSON object.

It seems the following interface in this spec is impacted by this change:

• PerformanceResourceTiming

It's a good candidate for the default toJSON operation, so the below should be all you need, provided you also similarly update PerformanceEntry in its relevant specification:

[Exposed=(Window,Worker)]
interface PerformanceResourceTiming : PerformanceEntry {
    readonly attribute DOMString initiatorType;
    // etc...
    [Default] object toJSON();
};

I'm sorry for the inconvenience this causes, but our hope is that this ultimately makes things a lot simpler and clearer for everybody.

Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions.

Thanks!

[igrigorik]

@tobie was the dependency in respec already updated? I'm seeing new WebIDL failures on https://w3c.github.io/navigation-timing/ that are causing all the links and references to be broken.

[tobie]

Yes, @marcoscaceres updated Respec yesterday: https://github.com/w3c/respec/pull/1300.

Is there something we could do better next time so you don't feel like we've pulled the rug from under you?

[igrigorik]

Yikes, well.. this was a very short (and unspecified) deadline, which doesn't make things easy. We have a lot of folks referencing the github.io versions, which are both broken at the moment. IMO, breaking changes like this need to have a much longer lead time.

@siusin @toddreifsteck any objections to us merging above toJSON changes?

[marcoscaceres]

Yeah, I should have added a warning. I figured this way we would just break things and quickly fix them.

[marcoscaceres]

(it only affects very few specs and it's a very easy fix - can send PR)

[igrigorik]

The affected specs are: HR-Time (w3c/hr-time#49), Resource Timing (w3c/navigation-timing#72), Navigation Timing. Any others I'm overlooking?

[tobie]

…and Performance Timeline (w3c/performance-timeline#82).

[tobie]

Can't these specs just link to a previous version of Respec in the meantime?

[igrigorik]

Add Server-Timing to that list: https://w3c.github.io/server-timing/

@tobie yes, we could, but this is unnecessary pain -- I think we could have handled this a bit better.

[tobie]

I think we could have handled this a bit better.

I can't disagree. I'm just trying to help find a solution for now and try to figure out how this can be improved next time.

On that latter topic I've opened a bug here: whatwg/webidl#379.

[igrigorik]

Resolved via #114.