Re: DOMString-like objects for the CSSOM

I think we're on a tangent here, but perhaps it's worth following.  
Here goes:

On Feb 19, 2010, at 6:06 PM, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:

> As one minor data point: WebKit returns a String-like object instead  
> of a string value for style.filter, and has been doing so for some  
> time (to support SVG filters without the risk of being detected as  
> IE). This object also has some impossible-per-spec behaviors, which  
> I won't go into here since they are not relevant to the point. The  
> point is that we haven't had apparent compatibility problems from  
> doing this.

We at Mozilla have considered that approach, both for implementation  
benefits vs. costs, and for developer-facing complexity reasons. We  
are sticking with our guns and not making a magic, ECMA-violating  
type. We may be lobbying for a name change for the SVG filter property  
(I'm not sure where that stands). See

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=374216 (your name was  
invoked in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=374216#c23 ;-).

Quoting from https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=374216#c46

"I've checked out http://www.housingmaps.com/ and it seems no  
different with or without dark magic (the popup windows appear just  
the same) so perhaps google maps has changed in the last 4 years."

("Dark magic" refers to any hack such as WebKit's masquerades-as- 
undefined strings and objects, or Gecko's detecting vs. non-detecting  
execution contexts, by which a property could be both a string or  
object *and* a falsy value.)

My point here not to dwell on dark magic details (ours wins cuz it's a  
static property of code, it does not infect the shared heap :-P --  
seriously, see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=521670) or  
whether it's good to violate normative specs (sometimes :-).

Rather I wanted to note that SVG filters don't seem to be used enough  
to tell whether this is even a data point, minor or major. It may have  
mattered once, because housing maps was *the* mash-up everyone talked  
about and tested. But if that mash-up (its google maps side) no longer  
uses .filter, is there a compelling reason for a string that  
masquerades as undefined?

If the SVG working group could rename this property, in practical  
deference to the pre-existing (since IE4, IIRC) de-facto Microsoft  
standard, that would be helpful.

Anyway, this is all a digression from the main point about not turning  
a string primitive into a String object to add properties to the  
String object. But it seemed worth citing the Mozilla bug, since we  
are not going to perpetrate more "dark magic" for want of demonstrable  
need.

/be

Received on Saturday, 20 February 2010 03:23:40 UTC