- From: Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky@MIT.EDU>
- Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2008 08:38:05 -0400
- To: Garrett Smith <dhtmlkitchen@gmail.com>
- CC: Web Applications Working Group WG <public-webapps@w3.org>
Garrett Smith wrote:
> There is no DOM method calld doStuff. Can you provide a concrete
> example? Boris couldn't think of one either.
Uh, what? You never said, "I don't understand that this applies to all
DOM methods that take a DOMString, so I'd like to have some specific
examples."
In any case, here's a simple example:
javascript:try { alert(document.createElement(null).localName); }
catch(e) { alert(e) }
In some UAs that alerts "null", in some it throws an exception because
createElement("") is not valid. Just try it.
> No, but there should be a need to call ToString.
The thing is, ToString is lossy. Once called, there is no way to tell
apart "null" and null. However, there are DOM methods which require
different behavior for the two (e.g. createElementNS and so forth, which
I did explicitly mention earlier, contrary to your "counldn't think of
one either" business).
Similarly, there are DOM methods that require different behavior for
null and "". Specific examples include the proposed DOM style set APIs,
DOMImplementation.createDocument. There are also cases where returning
null and returning "" are not equivalent. inputEncoding is an example.
> It is not something that can or should be generally relied upon
> because it is not standardized and indeed works differently in
> implementations.
Yes. The whole point is to standardize it.
> Considering your argument for serializing null -> "" being the most
> "sensible", I disagree.
It's sensible in the context of the large number of DOM methods that
treat the two as equivalent (again, all the *NS methods in DOM3 Core).
-Boris
Received on Tuesday, 26 August 2008 12:38:51 UTC