I propose that we change the numeric constants to enumerated strings in
the IndexedDB spec.
Reasoning is echoing the reasoning that came up for WebRTC:
<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-script-coord/2012JanMar/0166.html>
I'll just shamelessy quote Tobie Langel
<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-script-coord/2012JanMar/0168.html>:
Anne van Kesteren saying:
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).
So. What do you think? :-)
--
Odin Hørthe Omdal · Core QA, Opera Software · http://opera.com /
