Re: WRONG_DOCUMENT_ERR, possible wiggle room from the definition of the exception

On Dec 2, 2005, at 9:12 AM, Joseph Kesselman wrote:

> Hmmm. Normally I'd say that the description of the operation which  
> throws
> the exception dominates over the description of the exception,

And I would normally agree.

> but this
> does raise the question of whether the wiggle room is
> allowed-but-not-currently used (which may be perfectly reasonable, as
> exceptions may be reused in the future) or if the operation  
> description is
> stricter than it need be.

Or just not complete, relying on the preceeding error definition for  
the implied parenthetical qualifier.

Must be thrown would generally be considered the rule if the  
situation meets the description, but I am not sure in this case  
because the terser description in the operations themselves seems  
compatible to some extent with the longer description that might be  
said to set the stage. I didn't find any text clarifying that the  
exceptions must be thrown beyond than that they are thrown as  
described, but perhaps I missed something.

> I honestly don't know. Someone should dig back into the archives to  
> check.

It might take a bit of digging.  It would be nice to know the intent,  
especially during the DOM Level 1 period, since there was never a  
later desire to become explicitly incompatible (and Level 1 lacked an  
adopt method).

I can't honestly remember that the group decided that it had to be  
mandatory, which I was just assuming from the test case, but it is  
likely that such a discussion took place, but at level 1, the  
definition with parenthetical comment may have been formulated at the  
same time it was added to the methods, and I cannot see the group  
intentionally making these different.

Ray

Received on Friday, 2 December 2005 16:50:08 UTC