- From: Robin Berjon <robin.berjon@expway.fr>
- Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 23:01:41 +0100
- To: Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>
- Cc: "Web APIs WG (public)" <public-webapi@w3.org>
On Mar 22, 2006, at 20:25, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> On Mar 22, 2006, at 2:30 AM, Anne van Kesteren wrote:
>>> * IMHO the method should not raise an exception when the selector
>>> contains a pseudo-element. It should would return an empty list.
>>
>> Given that it per definition only returns Element nodes I don't
>> see why it shouldn't raise an exception.
>
> I think exceptions should be reserved for actual syntax errors, not
> for selectors that can't match an element. I'm sure there are other
> ways besides pseudo-elements to make a selector that can't match
> anything.
I'm not convinced that an exception is the best way to go, but being
able to make the difference between the inability to process the
request and the fact that nothing matched could prove important for
versioning purposes. For instance say v2 supports the ability to
return the first-letter inside an element while v1 doesn't, and I
want to write code that tries to do that using selectors in such a
way that if the implementation tells me it's impossible I fall back
to some hand-coded munging.
If we can't differentiate we'll have to resort to hasFeature(). Quite
frankly, give me exceptions any day over that :)
--
Robin Berjon
Senior Research Scientist
Expway, http://expway.com/
Received on Wednesday, 22 March 2006 22:01:48 UTC