On May 21, 2007, at 4:01 AM, Stewart Brodie wrote:
"Anne van Kesteren" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Mon, 21 May 2007 03:33:39 +0200, Cameron McCormack <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
Implementors that use the IDL to generate code for the
implementations:
which would you prefer?
Do implementors use the IDL directly or do they modify it before
using it?
In the latter case making the specification easier to write and
read makes
sense to me... Implementors that have ECMAScript support can also
benefit
as they can probably auto-generate more code if ECMAScript properties
becomes part of the new IDL syntax.
We don't auto-generate anything directly from the IDL, not least
because of
the sort of problems outlined earlier in this thread. Instead, we
have our
own internal XML format that serves the same purpose that we use to
generate
our DOM bindings headers, to drive automatic type coercions, and to
build
documentation of exactly which methods, constants, interfaces and
properties
are implemented.
There is just too much DOM0 stuff that we need to support that isn't
in the
IDL in the later DOM specifications anyway. Trying to reverse
engineer that
into IDL format doesn't sound like a lot of fun.
It's totally doable if you are willing to use IDL extended attributes
to mark up the quirks, Gecko has long done this and WebKit is now
using it for most interfaces as well. We're not using the W3C's IDL
files though, in either case.
And the standard W3C license for IDL files would likely make it
impossible to start with them. If we wanted to publish IDL that
implementors could use, we'd have to change the license.
Regards,
Maciej
