Fetch

Plan

Fetch is fetch.spec.whatwg.org and will define HTML fetch and CORS as a set of coherent algorithms rather than the intertwined mess we have now. It will also deal with the following:

• Deal with authentication (URLs containing username/password, servers responding with 401)
• Deal with URL processing
• Define HTTP context for data: URLs, about:blank, and file: URLs.
• Progress Events

Model

The basic model is Request -> Fetch -> Response.

Request

• Parsed URL (object)
• method (probably with restrictions as seen in XHR)
• UA headers
• author headers (maybe rename because people get upset with "author", with implicit restrictions as seen in XHR / CORS)
• entity body
• origin (object)
• referrer source (Document / URL)
• manual redirect flag
• omit credentials flag (will replace HTML fetch block cookies flag but also has other features)
• force preflight flag (set for upload progress notifications (to not reveal existence of server in case of POST I suppose; see bug 20322))
• synchronous flag
• force same-origin flag (looks identical to No CORS, fail, filed bug 20951)
• CORS mode
  • No CORS, taint (<link>, <script>, ...); still need to allow the server to opt in to CORS anyway to effectively make the resource CORS same-origin even if not requested as such (HTML does not have this feature
  • No CORS, fail (<track>)
  • Anonymous
  • Credentialed

Basic Fetch

See also URL. Fetch depends on the URL scheme. Unless it is a scheme listed below the response is a network error.

about

See URL schemes.

blob

http://dev.w3.org/2006/webapi/FileAPI/#processingModel

data

Response object as per http://xhr.spec.whatwg.org/#data:-urls-and-http

If the data URL fails to parse however return a network error.

file

This is by and large platform-specific.

ftp

Construct the request per the FTP specification, do the request, and expose the response.

http and https

Construct the request per the HTTP specification, do the request, and expose the response.

Fetch

Fetch defers to Basic Fetch except for http and https. It has the ability to handle redirects automatically (and somehow hide this redirecting happening from the caller). And deals with more complicated preflight requests if CORS is opted into and if CORS is not opted into it still examines the response to see if it can be marked CORS same-origin after all.

So basically Basic Fetch deals with a single request/response whereas Fetch tackles the more complicated setups required by most platform APIs.

Response

Both intermediate updates (progress, headers received, ...) and final. Also indicates network error / CORS error (exposed as network error), ...

More importantly, it expresses everything in terms of HTTP, regardless of whether the request was for file/blob/data/etc. For this we need to expose:

• Status code
• Status text
• Headers
• Entity body

Notes

Algorithm: "fetch"

• Sets up the request. Methods, headers, etc.
• Then branches based on specifics.

Actually fetching: "do the fetch"

• Should probably branch on URL scheme first.
• Gets the data.
• Needs to queue tasks unless suppressed (sync / CORS prefetch)
• Needs to be able to automatically follow redirects (http/https only).