- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2009 01:08:26 +0000 (UTC)
On Wed, 14 Jan 2009, Cameron McCormack wrote:
> >
> > [NameCreator, NameDeleter, NameGetter, NameSetter]
> > interface DOMStringMap {};
>
> At the moment, the interface is useful only for JS (and other languages
> that support this kind of indexing). For other languages, a
> DOMStringMap object would appear to be a completely opaque object
> without any means of interacting with it. Given that this is basically
> meant to be a shorthand for getting/setting attributes with particular
> names, I would be happy with it not existing in other language bindings.
> Web IDL doesn?t have a mechanism to state that an interface member or
> a definition should only be included if the target language binding is a
> particular one, though.
>
> An alternative would be to put operations on the interface to act as the
> getters/setters/etc., and use the [NoIndexingOperations] extended
> attribute to indicate that these operations won?t correspond to
> properties in language bindings such as ECMAScript. That would then at
> least make the interface useful for other languages.
What I would like to be able to say is: "This is how it works in JS. If
you are implementing this in another language binding, contact me and
we'll come up with a solution for that language."
I don't want this to only work in JS, I just haven't designed the API for
the other languages. And I don't want to introduce a suboptimal design --
e.g. the above IDL would be meaningless for Perl, where objects don't have
a concept of name getters, etc. But for Perl what we'd want is to expose a
tied hash, which is the equivalent of what this is in JS. But we don't yet
have WebIDL magic for Perl, so I can't say that yet.
Does that make sense?
--
Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Tuesday, 13 January 2009 17:08:26 UTC