Re: getting rid of callers

On Oct 12, 2010, at 9:14 PM, Cameron McCormack wrote:

> Various HTML*Collection interfaces and the HTMLFormElement interface
> define callers.  Callers seem unpopular with many people, so I am
> wondering how many can actually be safely removed from the spec.
> 
> Here are some tests I ran to see where they’re implemented:
> 
>  http://people.mozilla.com/~cmccormack/tests/callers.html
>  http://people.mozilla.com/~cmccormack/tests/callers-quirks.html
> 
> The results are here:
> 
>  http://people.mozilla.com/~cmccormack/tests/callers-results.html
> 
> (I left out the HTMLPropertyCollection ones since nobody implements that
> yet.)
> 
> So of all the callers, Firefox has been getting away with only
> implementing document.all("blah"), and only for quirks mode.
> 
> For HTMLFormElement, it seems only IE implements them.  Are they really
> necessary to have in the spec?
> 
> I don’t have any data on any of this.  Does anyone else?  Any browser
> vendors willing to drop any of these callers? :)

From your results, it seems like Firefox is the odd man out. I think the case against would have to be pretty compelling for every other browser to change to match Firefox.

I realize some people find custom call behavior distasteful, but it's not really clear to me what the practical problem is with it.

Also, I find quirks-mode-only DOM behaviors more distasteful than custom call behavior, so if document.all needs it at all, I'd rather do it everywhere than limit to quirks mode.

I do agree that it would be better not to propagate custom call behavior to objects that didn't have it before. I don't think there is much need for HTMLPropertyCollection to be an HTMLCollection.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Wednesday, 13 October 2010 05:48:16 UTC