Re: [dom3core] WRONG_DOCUMENT_ERR

On Dec 3, 2005, at 2:51 AM, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:

>
>
> Hi Ray,
>
> On Dec 2, 2005, at 6:05 PM, Ray Whitmer wrote:
>
>> On Dec 2, 2005, at 12:26 PM, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>>
>>> Firefox has the implicit adoption behavior. I am surprised you  
>>> don't know.
>>
>> Expect me to continue to respond to your ongoing jabs with my own  
>> questioning of your own knowledge, if I continue to respond at all.
>
> My apologies. I didn't mean this to come out as rude as I am sure  
> it sounded. I was also frustrated by the uniformly negative tone of  
> replies to my messages. I proposed errata to the spec originally  
> because Curt Arnold suggested this approach to compliance vs.  
> compatibility conflicts in the test suite(*). But now even he seems  
> critical of this approach.
>

> * - See e.g. http://bugzilla.opendarwin.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4569

Curt Arnold in bug 4569:

This may be another one to raise to the IG.  The test as written is  
consistent with the Java
implementations, the original NIST tests and my reading of the  
recommendation.  However, I do not
believe any browser raises the WRONG_DOCUMENT_ERR, though I'm not  
sure what they do in that
situation.  There may be a case for an errata to change the phrasing  
to "May be raised" based existing
implementations with corresponding changes to the tests.

---

Any disputes about the test suite go to the IG for resolution.  The  
NIST tests and my reading of the spec said it was required and  
without direction from the IG, I would not modify the tests.   
However, if the IG said that I misread the recommendation, I would  
modify the test suite on their direction.

I said "there may be a case", I didn't say there'd be a compelling  
case or I'd agree with it.  You presented a case, most comments have  
been negative but I think everybody here is sympathetic with the  
problem, just not the proposed solution of changing the expected  
behavior.  Unfortunately with the WG over, the process to come up  
with a better solution or dismiss the issue is uncertain.

If WRONG_DOCUMENT_ERR is optional, we potentially open up another set  
of problems, since the spec writers (probably) and the test writers  
definitely did not consider the potential scenarios that could occur  
when a node is inserted in another document.  Do we know that the  
current implementations that don't throw an exception implement the  
same behavior.  Maybe one does an importNode type action and another  
does an adoptNode type of action.

It would be reasonable to think that the original spec writers did  
not want to try to think through the issues that would be required to  
freely move nodes between documents and decided that the most  
expedient approach to make sure that implementations were consistent  
was to prohibit it.

Alternative solutions have been suggested and I don't know if you've  
stated your thoughts on them.  The ones that I remember off the top  
of my head were:

A Note that describes were ECMAScript implementations generally  
deviate from the recommendation for compatibility with existing content.

A configuration option in the browser that would allow the user  
(likely developer) to change between standard conformant and  
compatibility mode.

Received on Saturday, 3 December 2005 09:31:39 UTC