1000 Thanks! :)

Now what can we do to make your article show up in Ajaxian’s RSS feed / be mentioned in an Ajaxian article?

Maybe you can tweet to:
http://twitter.com/dalmaer
:)

Discuss on HN:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=562045

As a convoluted example, let’s say you want the MS-only outerHTML attribute in FireFox. It works exactly the same as InnerHTML, but includes the container tags as well. Before, there was nothing you could do to implement this so it worked the same as in IE, now you can.

Or what about CSS3 style attributes. Let’s say you want to access a CSS feature, but the browser doesn’t support it. You can simulate it, so in JavaScript it works exactly the same as if it was native, and then when it’s implemented natively in all supported browsers simply drop your old code. This allows you to use future features today.

From that point of view, I think it’s a huge step forward.

Having to write less code is quite a benefit IMO. If I have a property on an object that updated the textual content, it would make much more sense to define it as .text and not .text(str).

I don’t understand. It’s a difference of one character. .text=str vs .text(str). The latter is substantially more clear, and comes at the cost of a single character.

The same argument could be applied to any function you call on a 3rd party library.

Not true. A method call does not obscure itself as a property assignment. You may still have to dig into the internals to find out why something went wrong, or simply why something happened, but you are not going to be mislead around the source of the method call that is syntactically a property assignment.

Of course, the first thing I thought of when I heard about getters and setters was, “gee, I could do all kinds of background work upon setting a value, it would really simplify my non-library code!”

But then it occurred to me that working against other people’s libraries could be a real mess. You get or set a value, and who knows what’s happening in the background. You end up having to do a lot of digging into the library, at which point, you really might as well be maintaining your own library, right?

Anyway, let me do what you didn’t do and actually cover the major changes: new internal object properties and ways of accessing them (via Object.defineProperty, Object.defineProperties, Object.getOwnPropertyNames); being able to set properties for getters/setters (i.e. call functions when you get/set objects); properties to be able to set how objects can be changed and functions to access and check them(frozen, seal and preventExtensions); being able to set whether an object is enumerable (i.e. whether or not it appears in for… in loop); addition of array prototypes map, reduce, reduceRight, filter, some, and forEach; a real Object.create function instead of having to do it by hand (finally!); and native JSON.