Re: [dom3core] getAttribute

On Tue, Dec 6, 2005 at 1:55 PM, Brendan Eich <brendan@meer.net> wrote:
>
>   Then, after adoption, IE unilaterally changed it,
>
>
> This is not so.  IE always implemented an odd mixture of nullable string
> valued properties and non-nullable string-valued properties (which when
> missing are returned as ""), and furthermore mapped properties to attributes
> directly, via getAttribute.
>

To be technically correct, IE will sometimes return a null pointer
that gets treated as an empty string.

http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.scripting.jscript/msg/67314e7b33d9336e?dmode=source

> So this has everything to do with backward compatibility going back to IE 4.
>  The Mozilla experiment that you describe was much later, and suffered the
> nullability confounder.  I just spoke with Johnny Stenback about this and he
> said there may have been confusion when testing IE between nullable and
> non-nullable attributes mapped from DOM JS properties.
>

This is an interesting thread, for historical reasons.

> /be
>
>