On May 2, 2008, at 8:17 PM, Boris Zbarsky wrote:
Cameron McCormack wrote:
I think of it more like that null is the actual namespace URI
value, and
that an empty string is the non-standard way of specifying it (rather
than the other way around). Which makes me think of this more as
something the method should handle, rather than something the
bindings
worry about.
But the method signature in IDL is DOMString. So by the time it
sees the argument, it will be a DOMString. The only question is
which DOMString.
In Gecko, if you pass in "" it will see the string "".
If you pass in null, it will see a string that is equal to "" but
has a "this is a null string" bit set.
Conceptually, the latter is more like a |char * str = NULL| and the
former is more like a |char * str = "";| but both represented by a
String object of some sort.
This is essentially what WebKit does as well (for methods where we've
indicated null should convert to null string). In other cases, the
default JS rule is used, yielding "null".
It might make sense to declare this the default conversion of null
to DOMString and then have NoNull mean that the
Object.prototype.toString conversion should be used instead.
It would be a little awkward that the DOM default is not the same as
JS language builtins but we effectively have this problem already.
Regards,
Maciej
