- From: Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc>
- Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 21:58:21 -0700
- To: Sunava Dutta <sunavad@windows.microsoft.com>
- Cc: Zhenbin Xu <Zhenbin.Xu@microsoft.com>, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>, "public-webapps@w3.org" <public-webapps@w3.org>, IE8 Core AJAX SWAT Team <ieajax@microsoft.com>
Sunava Dutta wrote: >> The argument for returning null is that it makes for a cleaner API, >> exceptions should only be thrown in exceptional circumstances. And >> based >> on available data it doesn't seem like sites currently care one way or >> another, so I think we should go for the cleaner API. >> >> What is the argument for throwing an exception? >> >> / Jonas > > [Sunava Dutta] I can't believe you asked that question after all the discussions that just happened on that with Ian, Zhenbin and you. With all due respect, is this an 'engage and lock' until someone gets frustrated and quits strategy or is there something outside of technical arguments that Mozilla is concerned about? -:) Not at all. I'm basing my arguments on technical merits. The argument from microsoft seems to be "we want to throw exceptions because that is what we are doing now and we are worried changing our implementation will break existing websites". However my counter argument is that other browsers have not followed microsofts implementation in this regard and this does not seem to have caused any interoperability issues. Therefore we should use the API that results in the best API. I have yet to see any counter argument from microsoft on this point other than "we think the spec should allow both exceptions and returning null", however this goes against the goals of the spec and so I don't see this as an option. I know there is a lot of miscommunication going on right now, which is why I have been trying to describe my reasonings and the w3c process in the past few mails. If the two parties can't decide on an issue the best cause of action is to summarize the technical arguments (which includes interoperability) for all solutions and then take a decision together based on those technical arguments. / Jonas
Received on Friday, 20 June 2008 04:59:49 UTC