Re: [whatwg/dom] Clarify that new Document creates a document of type "html", not "xml" (#308)

All that follows is about specs; implementations have not quite converged.

Almost all documents are `Document`s. This includes both XML and HTML documents.

However, there is a method, `document.implementation.createDocument()`, which returns an `XMLDocument`, because sometimes people use the `load()` method of the return value of `createDocument()` for Ajax-ish purposes.

In https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/1478 we removed `XMLDocument.prototype.load`, making `XMLDocument` an empty interface. This means we could probably kill `XMLDocument` entirely from the specs; that discussion is #278 and make all documents ever simply `Document`s.

A further complication: as of 2012 Gecko needs `XMLDocument` and its `load` method for web compat on Gecko-only code paths. https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/1530 tracks adding it back in Gecko compatibility mode, since Gecko has expressed that they prefer that to experimenting with removing it.

-- 
You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread.
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
https://github.com/whatwg/dom/issues/308#issuecomment-241172013

Received on Saturday, 20 August 2016 02:00:28 UTC