On Mar 9, 2007, at 4:32 PM, Christian Cantrell wrote:
I recently noticed something that surprised me in a new build of
WebKit. I found that some dashboard widgets don't run, including
some Apple widgets like Stocks. When I investigated, I found that
some widgets access custom DOM attributes using dot notation rather
than the getAttribute function. For instance, with HTML like this...
<table>
<tr id="tr" foo="bar">
<td>hi.</td>
</tr>
</table>
... they might access the value of foo like this...
document.getElementById("tr").foo;
... rather than this...
var tr = document.getElementById("tr").getAttribute('foo');
I understand that this is considered a "fix" or a move toward more
standardization, but I'm worried that this will break a lot of
existing content, including some dashboard widgets written by Apple.
That's right. It was this change, made about a year ago: <http://
trac.webkit.org/projects/webkit/changeset/14069>.
It's not a "fix" in quotes -- it's a real life fix to actual
websites. It was motivated by the desire to fix those sites, not an
abstract urge for standardization.
Ultimately when we need a change like this for website compatibility
we have a tough decision to make about WebKit-specific content like
widgets that has not been tested with other engines. In some cases we
create application-specific quirks, but we try to avoid creating long
term differences between, say, the behavior of Dashboard and Safari
with the same content.
Does anyone have an insight into this issue? Will everyone just
need to update their content when Leopard comes out?
Yes, some widgets will need to be updated. There's no need to wait
for Leopard to come out; an updated widget would be backward compatible.
As far as websites are concerned, I assume few sites depend on this
behavior since Firefox's Gecko matches the new WebKit behavior.
-- Darin
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