Re: [WebIDL] Worry on Enum type - binding seems inconsistently defined

On 01/12/2012 02:08 PM, Cameron McCormack wrote:
> Hi Harald.
>
> Arthur Barstow:
>> Hi Cameron, All - would you please respond to the question below about
>> Web IDL? -Thanks, AB
>
> Tab is right, I haven't been monitoring mailing lists as closely this 
> week. :)
>
> Harald Alvestrand:
>> However, one detail makes the spec at this time a bit hard to
>> understand: In section 3.5, the following is said:
>>
>> Note
>>
>> In the ECMAScript binding, assignment of an invalid string value to
>> anattribute <http://dev.w3.org/2006/webapi/WebIDL/#dfn-attribute>is
>> ignored, while passing such a value as anoperation
>> <http://dev.w3.org/2006/webapi/WebIDL/#dfn-operation>argument results in
>> an exception being thrown.
>>
>> However, in the ECMAScript binding, section 4.2.18, it says:
>>
>> An ECMAScript value V is converted to an IDL enumeration type value as
>> follows (where E is the enumeration):
>>
>> 1. Let S be the result of calling ToString(V).
>> 2. If S is not one of E’s enumeration values, then throw a TypeError.
>> 3. Return the enumeration value of type E that is equal to S.
>>
>> I'm not sure it says the same thing; more clarity on the expected
>> behaviour would be useful.
>> (My personal opinion is that it's most useful if assigment throws an
>> exception; silent failure is rarely the best option.)
>
> The current behaviour is that invalid enumeration values when assigned 
> to attributes are ignored, whereas when they're passed to operations 
> they cause an exception to be thrown.  This was done at Anne's 
> request, and the reasoning given was that that's the way the various 
> HTML DOM properties tend to work.

Thanks!

Anne, are you on this list? (don't know if my posting makes this list, 
since it's another list I'm likely not a member of).

Does "ignored" in this case mean that the attribute retains its previous 
value? This seems to me to be likely to lead to hard-to-debug errors, or 
"set-and-test" type programming - but I'm not an experienced DOM 
programmer...

                     Harald

Received on Thursday, 12 January 2012 13:50:43 UTC