This is a working draft of a proposal to define the scope and content of a maintenance revision of ES 3 (e.g. ES 3.1). Creation of this proposal was identified as an action item at the March 2007 meeting (minutes_mar_21_2007). The initial version of this proposal was authored by: Pratap Lakshman (Microsoft), Douglas Crockford (Yahoo), and Allen Wirfs-Brock (Microsoft)

Our goal for this first draft was to capture initial ES3.1 ideas so they could serve as a basis for further discussion. We realize that there are internal inconsistencies within the proposal. In fact, the initial author don’t necessarily EVEN have full consensus on all the individual proposed changes. However, we do think that this can serve as a starting point for work on ES3.1.

— Allen Wirfs-Brock 2007/04/16 08:47

• Introduction
• ES3.1 Goals
• Compatibility Requirements between ES3, ES3.1 and ES4
  • Forward compatibility between ES3 and ES3.1
  • Backward compatibility between ES3.1 and ES3
  • Forward compatibility between ES3.1 and ES4
  • Backward compatibility between ES4 and ES3.1
• Design Principles
• Publication Alternatives
  • Relationship with the ES4 Specification
  • Specification Format
• Resources and schedule
• Conclusion

• Proposed Changes
  • New features
    • MIME type
    • Secure eval
    • JSON support
    • Targeted additions to Array,String,Object,Date
    • Richer reflection capability on function
    • Readonly built-in object contructors
    • Getters and Setters
  • ES 3 Specification Corrections
    • arguments array as "Array"
    • Inner Functions and this
    • Other bug fixes
    • ES3 Errata from Mozilla
    • Catch clause context specification
    • Date object
  • Eliminate ES 3 Irregularities
    • Identifiers in the Object Literal Notation
    • Member Identifiers in Dot Notation
    • Object Literal Notation
  • May Be Disabled in Strict Mode
    • eval() function
    • "with" statement
    • arguments.callee
    • Instantiating Primitive type wrappers

— Pratap Lakshman 2007/04/15 01:48

The drafts are a work-in-progress.

The following is a brief list of TBD items and assignments:

• Update Array generics to be as implemented by Mozilla Pratap
• Add support for reduce and reduceRight (from JS 1.8) Pratap
• Introduce support for “abc”[i] (3 out of 4 browsers support this notation to index into a string) Pratap
• Update the Date section to be compatible with proposed-ES4 Pratap
• JSON Doug
• Decimal Sam
• Getters/Setters (introducing syntactic sections that add them to object literals) Kris
• ... and specify related static methods on Object Allen
• Unicode related updates Doug
• Modify the internal property “Put” on Arrays to account for strict mode Pratap
• Update notation used (as appropriate) Allen + everyone whose hasn’t used it
• Cleanup and update Appendixes and Annexes Pratap
• Ensure Review based on the Deviations document Adam

— Pratap Lakshman 2008/05/29 04:26