Re: [whatwg] classList should perhaps move from HTMLElement to Element

On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 5:31 PM, Cameron McCormack <cam@mcc.id.au> wrote:

> Rik Cabanier:
>
>  There was a discussion in the SVG WG about dropping the
>> SVGAnimatedxxx objects and have replace them with regular values. We
>> would need some tricks so we can change the DOM, but make it
>> backward compatible at the same time.
>>
>
> We have discussed this a few times, and I would desparately love for it
> to work, but I am unconvinced it will.  I can an imagine an author
> writing code like:
>
>  if (!elt.className) ...
>
> to test if a class has been set.  Even if we made the
> SVGElement.className SVGAnimatedString object one that stringifies to
> the class, add a [PutForwards] on to it so that assigning a string
> works, it would still break the above code, since the ! operator always
> returns false for an object.
>

Who would do this in the current SVG world? As you say, (!elt.className)
would always return false...
Are you worried that new content won't work with an old viewer?

Rik