RE: [cssom-values] Possibility of patching existing CSS strings into Values objects?

> I've been thinking about the CSSOM Values API today, since SVG is
> wanting to do essentially the same thing for its attributes. One of
> the downsides of it is that we need to expose the Value objects as
> something separate, because we currently always return strings.
>
> How realistic is it to change the type of attributes like
> el.style.color from DOMString to a CSSValue, where CSSValue has a
> stringifier and the attribute has a [PutForwards] on it?



I've something simpler for you, that I personally plan to use at some point for my getSpecifiedStyle() API:

return a String object instead of a String, and add a custom expando property on it to retreive your values. That preserves all the String stuff since you actually return a String, and the only difference is that you can actually 


    var color = document.style.color.cssValue;
    var strRGBA = color.asRGBA()
    var strHSLA = color.asHSLA()


The only downside is that you basically create a box. Browsers could optimize the case where you use the string value by not generating the box in this case, but sometimes you just store the thing in a variable and there's no way to tell someone will not ask for the cssValue at some point...

I don't know how String boxes reduce the performance of an app. I guess not too much, but on something as critical as "style", not too much might already be too much ^_^

Best regards,
Francois

Received on Thursday, 8 August 2013 23:56:00 UTC