- From: Michael A. Puls II <shadow2531@gmail.com>
- Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2008 17:14:38 -0400
- To: "Boris Zbarsky" <bzbarsky@mit.edu>
- Cc: "Web Applications Working Group WG" <public-webapps@w3.org>
On Wed, 27 Aug 2008 08:34:03 -0400, Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky@mit.edu> wrote: > Michael A. Puls II wrote: >> 'textContent' takes a DOMString, null is not one > > Uh... Except null IS a DOMString according to the DOM specs. Certainly > they implicitly treat it as one, and one of the clarifications that > WebIDL is making is making it clearer that null is a valid DOMString > value. > >> null is toString()ed to "null" and the textContent becomes "null". > > Except that's not what the spec for textContent says to do. Please do > read the spec. Carefully. Yes, understood. Those were just my guesses for reasons why Opera does what it does. >> I know Opera differs in these cases compared to Safari and Firefox, but >> from an ECMAScript point of view, Opera does what I expect. > > But it doesn't do what the DOM spec says to do in the textContent case. > Sad, but there you are. Understood. >> With that said, if that's a behavior of ECMAScript and the DOM spec >> clashes, which one gets priority and in what situations and why? > > The DOM spec gets priority for methods it defines, just like in all > cases of host objects and methods. There are no requirements for those > to follow all sorts of rules that native methods and objects have to > follow. See the ECMAScript spec. O.K. Thanks. That clears it up right there. >> Although I understand why it might be desired to have null have the >> same effect as "", it seems odd to be so inconsistent across different >> things in the DOM and inconsistent with ECMAScript (which exposes the >> DOM to users, in browsers). > > It _is_ odd. But it's an established fact of life, and changing that > behavior is not acceptable at this point. Understood. > Too bad no one brought all this up back when the DOM specs were being > written. Or maybe they did, and the non-ECMAScript users of the DOM > carried the day on the issue. Again, in other languages the fact that > null is a string is much more natural than in ECMAScript. Yes, too bad. Thanks -- Michael
Received on Wednesday, 27 August 2008 21:15:26 UTC