Re: Web IDL Garden Hose

On 9/27/09 2:28 AM, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> This is not an issue for DOM methods. It's an issue for interfaces such
> as HTMLCollection and HTMLFormElement that support indexing by function
> call syntax, for legacy compatibility reasons.

Huh.  Gecko hasn't supported this, and we haven't had problems with it. 
  Is it really for legacy compat reasons, of just because more than one 
vendor happens to support it without really knowing why, like tags() on 
HTMLCollection?  Did Webkit and Opera have particular compat issues 
without implementing this stuff?

For what it's worth, I just tested and it looks like Opera and Webkit 
support () on HTMLCollection; the former doesn't support it on the 
return value of getElementsByTagName while the latter does.  Gecko does 
not support either.  The spec also has the () thing going on for 
HTMLFormControlsCollection; again we've never had any serious compat 
problems with this in Gecko.

As for HTMLFormElement, while the spec says what it says, it's not 
exactly for "compatibility reasons" other than "IE must be willing to 
implement this spec and nothing outside this spec", I assume.  Both 
Opera and Webkit throw in this testcase:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<body>
   <form name="foo">
   <input name="bar">
     <script>try {
       alert(document.foo("bar"));
     } catch(e) { alert(e); }
     </script>

whereas they should return the input, per spec.

I hadn't realizes the spec required this syntax, and I would be somewhat 
interested in understanding why it does and whether it's actually 
required "for compatibility reasons" (in the sense that a new UA on the 
market would have to implement it to be compatible with existing sites).

-Boris

Received on Sunday, 27 September 2009 19:37:50 UTC