On 28/04/10 23:28, Garrett Smith wrote:
On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 2:12 AM, James Graham<jgra...@opera.com> wrote:
On 04/28/2010 10:27 AM, David Bruant wrote:
When I started this thread, my point was to define a normalized way
(through ECMAScript binding) to add array extras to array-like objects
in the scope of HTML5 (HTMLCollection and inheriting interfaces).
I don't see any reason yet to try to find a solution to problems that
are in current web browsers.
Of course, if/when a proposal emerges from this thread and some user
agent accept to implement it, a workaround (probably, feature detection)
will have to be found to use the feature in user agents that implement
it and doing something equivalent in web browsers that don't.
To be clear the proposals in this thread are pure syntactic sugar; they
don't allow you do do anything that you can't already do like:
Array.prototype.whatever.call(html_collection, arg1, arg2, ...)
where "whatever" is the array method you are interested in.
- and from that you can expect errors in Internet Explorer up to and
including version 8.
Adding a toArray operation (for example) won't work in IE up to and
including version 8 though either. There's no point in adding a toArray
operation for the pure reason that they currently don't implement
another part of the spec (through the WebIDL references) currently.
toArray adds no extra usefulness once they implement other parts of the
spec.
Of course there is nothing wrong with making the syntax more natural if it
can be done in a suitably web-compatible way. However it seems more sensible
to do this at a lower level e.g. as part of Web DOM Core. Sadly that spec is
in need of an editor.
The problem that has been well established is that Internet Explorer's
implementation of host object collections or "dhtml collection"[1]
objects is incompatible with JScript implementation of Array generics.
The result of attempting to supply an Internet Explorer "dhtml
collection" to an Array generic method, e.g. "slice", as the `this`
value, results in a jscript runtimer error: "JScript object expected".
IE8:
[].slice.call(document.styleSheets);
Result:
Error: "JScript object expected".
In IE8 document.styleSheets.toArray().slice(0, 1); also throws an error.
How does adding toArray help for IE8, which you're giving as the reason
for adding it?
Travis Leithead and IE Team: Can you release Internet Explorer 9 with
all "dhtml collections" implemented as native EcmaScript objects?
As far as I am aware, none of them are on this list.
--
Geoffrey Sneddon — Opera Software
<http://gsnedders.com/>
<http://www.opera.com/>
