Re: [WICG/webcomponents] Reference Target: what type should the `referenceTarget` attribute be? (Issue #1093)

alice left a comment (WICG/webcomponents#1093)

> I don't see how 3 would work with `delete`. That doesn't end up invoking the getter or setter, iirc.

Hm, yeah, I didn't really think about that. Definitely a non-starter!

> I have a preference for 2 as that more closely matches the semantics of the `id` getter/setter and `getElementById()`.

It's *slightly* different from the `id` setter in that if you do `el.id = ''`, `el` will sprout an empty `id` attribute, which will result in a different result when using `getAttribute()` or `hasAttribute()` or attribute selector matching. Obviously it won't do you much good for any ID-based APIs, since it's an invalid ID, but it does change the semantics of the element.

Implementation-wise, it looks like both existing implementations currently assume a non-null value for `referenceTarget` is meaningful, even if it's an empty string: i.e. any non-null value (including empty string) for `referenceTarget` means that the host will **not** be the result of resolving the reference target.

If we went with option 2, I think we'd have to update the implementations and write the spec such that the value defaults to empty string, and we consider empty string to be a "missing value" meaning that the host should be the result of resolving the reference target in that case.

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