Re: typeof document.all

On Thu, 15 Oct 2009, Brendan Eich wrote:
> On Oct 15, 2009, at 5:55 PM, Ian Hickson wrote:
> > On Thu, 15 Oct 2009, Brendan Eich wrote:
> > > 
> > > Please open your eyes to this relevant factoid, and take it into 
> > > account in where you work to specify fully, since you cannot specify 
> > > everything that might matter fully in any bounded amount of time, 
> > > and you agree that things like GC cycles are more important and 
> > > currently underserved..
> > 
> > I've spent far more time specifying GC stuff than document.all.
> 
> Ok, but not the cycle issues.

Could you elaborate on that? If there are issues not yet addressed, I'd 
love to fix them too.


> > Actually I spent very little time (an afternoon?) specifying 
> > document.all to the point where I was happy that it was fully 
> > specified and compatible with legacy content. It wasn't that 
> > difficult.
> 
> I didn't think so, but it's not necessary to overspecify for interop 
> today. Let's not go in circles: my point is not to optimize only *your* 
> time, but everyone currently thrashing document.all here, in 
> public-script-coord, and on es-discuss. We are very far from done with 
> some "value types" solution in ES-Harmony.

I don't think this need take much of anyone's time -- the model in HTML5 
today could be easily supported by ES3 just by ES3 saying that host 
objects can have special behaviour for 'typeof' and 'ToBoolean()', just 
like they have special behaviour for many other things, like [[Get]]. ES5 
presumably has similar concept and could have "hooks" defined for similar 
features, without needing the entire model to be changed to support this.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Friday, 16 October 2009 01:30:23 UTC