Re: Comment from CSS WG on HTML DOM draft

From: "Joseph Kesselman" <keshlam@us.ibm.com>
Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2002 15:41:00 -0500
Subject: Re: Comment from CSS WG on HTML DOM draft

> I'm not opposed to adding the "indeterminate" flag. Personally I'd prefer a
> single tri-state value rather than one bit of data and one bit of "is it
> meaningful", for clarity and coding convenience,, but if the current value
> is a boolean I agree that changing it to a short integer or bitfield would
> have backward-compatability problems.

Precisely.  And the proposed property is backwards-compatible itself.

> (However, one minor quibble: I'd argue that IE for Mac and IE for Windows
> should be treated as two ports of one implementation,

For the record, IE/Mac's DOM implementation is not a port of IE/Windows' DOM
implementation.  IE/Mac's DOM implementation is provided by the Tasman
presentation engine which is an independent codebase from IE/Windows, and
which was written by a separate team (in a different state for that matter).

> not an example of
> existing interoperability

With IE5/Mac we went to great effort to ensure compatibility with
IE5/Windows DOM (with the exception of a few minor areas such as Text Ranges
and ActiveX).

> This certainly doesn't mean we
> shouldn't adopt their solution if it's a good one; it just means that as a
> precedent it has less weight than if multiple vendors had already
> implemented it. And yeah, I'd say the same thing if it was IBM's
> implementations.)

True, multiple vendor support implies greater political acceptance.

However, two separate teams (whether the same vendor or not) doing
independent implementations should have equivalent weight on a technical
basis.

Regards,

Tantek

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tantek Çelik                                         tantek@cs.stanford.edu
Tasman Development Lead, Microsoft Corporation        tantekc@microsoft.com
W3C CSS working group representative, W3C HTML working group alternate

Received on Monday, 14 January 2002 23:53:24 UTC