[whatwg] Specs for window.atob() and window.btoa()

Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+w3c at gmail.com
Sat Feb 5 16:29:45 PST 2011


On Fri, Feb 4, 2011 at 6:59 PM, Simon Pieters <simonp at opera.com> wrote:
> Is the compat problem for not throwing for whitespace or for not throwing
> for other garbage? If it's for other garbage, we could allow whitespace but
> throw for other garbage. (The bugs I can find in our database with a quick
> search is about non-ASCII characters not throwing.)

Opera people were the only ones who told me about these compat
problems, so it could be just non-ASCII characters.  I went with
Gecko's behavior exactly because it seemed simpler than WebKit's and I
had been told Opera's wasn't fully web-compatible.  Both Gecko and
WebKit do throw on any whitespace.

> Better performance seems like an incentive.

I don't object to a spec change if browsers are willing to change
their implementations.  I'd be a bit surprised if these functions are
widely used in performance-critical situations, though.



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