[whatwg] DOM Storage feedback

[Jonas Sicking]

On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 4:26 PM, Cameron McCormack <cam at mcc.id.au> wrote:
> Jonas Sicking:
>> So in the null column an "S" means that it's treated as "null", an "E"
>> as "", but what does "N" mean?
>
> "N" means that I was able to determine that null was treated as the
> actual null value, rather than converted to a string.

So it behaves different from passing in an empty string? For some
functions this surprises me, such as for the namespace parameter for
getAttributeNS, I would think that we there treat "" the same as null.

>> Yes, there are definitely a lot of "S"s in the null column for
>> non-firefox browsers. The question to me is if this is really needed
>> for webcompat though. Looking though our bug database I see no
>> indication of that, but that's not necessarily a proof.
>>
>> If we were able to use "" as the default behavior for null then we
>> would be able to get away with much fewer exceptions (so far alert()
>> and and possibly write() has been found).
>
> OK.  So what is more important for choosing the default: fewer
> exceptions (and thus fewer [Null=…] things polluting the IDL),
> consistency with the default stringification behaviour of ECMAScript,
> or avoiding the somewhat counterintuitive default behaviour of
> converting a valid value of the type to a different value of that type?

"converting a valid value of the type to a different value of that
type", which values exactly?

I think another factor, that you haven't mentioned, that is very
important is web compatibility. But beyond that I think I would rate
fewer exceptions highest.

/ Jonas