Re: RTCError, DOMError, and... what happened?

On 10/10/2013 10:31 PM, Adam Roach wrote:
> I recently went into the WebRTC spec to look up something regarding
> error handling, and was quite surprised to find some nontrivial
> changes to how this is all handled.
>
> The first thing that's changed is that the code names have all been
> converted to camel case. That's fine. I mean, it's purely cosmetic,
> and it breaks everything, but I guess it's a developing spec, so we
> can deal with that.
>
> What I'm finding a most perplexing, though, is that these were
> converted to raw DOMErrors, rather than defining RTCError as a
> subclass of DOMError. In particular, I'm more than a little agitated
> that we've thrown away our "message" field that we were using before.
> This provided invaluable diagnostic information for developers.

FWIW, the 2004 (!) version of DOMError contains the "message" field:

http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-3-Core/core.html#ERROR-Interfaces-DOMError

and is still in the 23 Sep 2013 Anne version (while a lot of other stuff
in the 2004 version has been thrown away):

http://dom.spec.whatwg.org/#interface-domerror

If he switches to DOMException, and we decide to follow him, we get an
"exception" object whose definition I can't find at the moment (I think
it's in the ECMAscript spec), but it's clear from the text in the 23 Sep
2013 version that it's expected to have "name" and "message" fields,
just like DOMError.

The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them....

> Is there some reason *why* we can't derive RTCError from DOMError in
> the same way as we're apparently doing for RTCSdpError? (While we're
> at it, I'll point out that simply saying "something is wrong on line
> x, you go figure it out" is a bit unsatisfying as well -- we should
> have a "message" field here as well.)
>
> The other thing that makes me a bit sad here is that I can't find any
> discussion of this error handling change anywhere in the mailing list
> archives. Did I simply miss this the conversation, or did it result
> from some non-public exchanges?
>
> /a
>


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