[whatwg] DOMTokenList methods would be more useful with a space separated token list

Ian Hickson ian at hixie.ch
Wed May 2 16:17:19 PDT 2012


On Wed, 2 May 2012, Rick Waldron wrote:
> 
> JS APIs like this should always return the object (constructed instance 
> or not) and therefore chain implicitly.

I understand that this is mostly a matter of taste in API design, but IMHO 
that's an anti-pattern. It encourages poor style; it discourages 
functional programming patterns, instead favouring state mutation 
patterns; it makes APIs harder to extend; it makes APIs that do have 
useful return values inconsistent with other APIs; it is, in fact, a 
layering violation: it attempts to shoehorn what should be a language 
design feature into the API layer.

But I'll leave it up to the DOM guys to decide what to do for that 
interface. :-)

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'



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