Re: [dom3core] getAttribute

A lot of good traffic on today.  Sorry I was asleep when much of it  
happened and couldn't participate in real time.

The DOM L1 test suite has a couple of tests that check for an empty  
string return from getAttribute, specifically elementgetelementempty,  
elementreplaceexistingattribute (and hc_ variants), and  
hc_elementremoveattribute.

C++ bindings using STL strings are one instance of a language that  
does not have distinct representation of a NULL string.

There is a legitimate end-user benefit for non-dominant browsers to  
conform the de-facto behavior when it deviates from the spec.   
However, HTML browsers are only one class of apps that implement the  
DOM spec.  If an errata was issued that made null a valid return  
value for getAttribute, Java code that depended on the behavior in  
the recommendation could break with a new comformant Java  
implementation that decided to return null instead of empty.

There may be some benefit from documenting where HTML+Javascript  
implementations are known to deviate from the recommendation for  
compatibility.  However, if something is done, it should be done in a  
way that XHTML+Javascript or SVG+Javascript browsers are required to  
follow the recommendation since there isn't a significant body of  
existing script.