Re: ECMA TC 39 / W3C HTML and WebApps WG coordination

On Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 9:56 AM, Brendan Eich <brendan@mozilla.com> wrote:
> Three distinct topics are being mixed up here:
>
> 1. Whether to use WebIDL or some unproposed alternative.
>
> 2. Whether to use catchall patterns in new WebIDL-defined interfaces.
>
> 3. Whether the JS WebIDL bindings should be standardized by Ecma or W3C.
>
> The straw man (0. Whether to remove catchall patterns from existing WebIDL
> interfaces required for backward compatibility) is nonsense and I'm going to
> ignore it from here on.
>
> My positions are:
>
> 1. WebIDL, the bird in the hand (I agree with Sam: go invent something
> better, come back when you're done).
>
> 2. Don't keep perpetuating catchall patterns, they are confusing for
> developers and costly for implementors and static analysis tools, even if
> implementable in some future ES edition.
>
> 3. Don't care.

Regarding 2. How do you feel about index accessors? I.e. for example you can do:

myNode.children[5]

which returns the same as

myNode.children.item(5)

This seems equally impossible to implement in ECMAScript, but is
something that I think is helpful to authors so not something that I
want to stop adding to new interfaces.

/ Jonas

Received on Friday, 25 September 2009 19:09:48 UTC