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 HÃrthe Omdal  Core QA, Opera Software  http://opera.com /