>On Wed, 15 Feb 2012 14:57:00 +0100, Harald Alvestrand ><har...@alvestrand.no> wrote: >> *This is a call for help from the WEBRTC working group. >> We are defining a new API >> (http://dev.w3.org/2011/webrtc/editor/webrtc.html) <about:blank>which >> has a number of cases where it needs to use arguments, or expose state >> variables, that can take only a limited set of values. > >Unless there are strong ties to certain legacy APIs I would suggest using > >strings. They are easier for developers to author, easier for developers >to maintain, easier in the future to extend, and have practically no >drawbacks.
I second that. Authors barely ever used the defined constants (for good reason, some implementations were missing them) preferring to use integers directly. Instead of seeing the verbose but descriptive: if (node.nodeType == Node.ELEMENT_NODE) { ... } one came across the following more often than not: if (node.nodeType == 1) { ... } to which: if (node.nodeType == "element") { ... } should be preferred. Constants would only have practical benefits over strings if they were defined in the global scope, as in: if (node.nodeType == NODE_ELEMENT_NODE) { ... } as typos would be caught early on (undeclared variables throw ReferenceErrors). --tobie