Comments on: Implied globals in browsers

By: deadlyicon

deadlyicon — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 07:19:50 +0000

I’d love to see some speed tests between the following methods:

// vs.

also what if you wanted to define `MyScope.name` ? =\

By: deadlyicon

deadlyicon — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 07:17:53 +0000

I’d love to see some speed tests between the following methods:

// vs.

MyScope = ({version:”1.2.3″});

also what if you wanted to define `MyScope.name` ? =\

By: mjuhl

mjuhl — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 22:23:25 +0000

Good knowledge to have. I strongly dislike polluted global name spaces.

By: ExtAnimal

ExtAnimal — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 13:08:22 +0000

Pointless.

By: fcaldera

fcaldera — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 07:38:10 +0000

I noticed this weird behaviour some times ago, when I wrote a page with the meta “copyright” and a form with a field whose id was ‘copyright’

By: fabienmenager

fabienmenager — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 06:42:17 +0000

@vcohen, this doc is irrelevent, as it only deals with the anchor tag, not at all with getElementById which should ONLY look at the id. Anyway, there really shouldn’t be so many “shortcuts” to nodes from the DOM without any explicit action, this may decrease performance too. I think this is the kind of stuff that makes IE even slower than it should. Firefox 3.5 seems to do the right thing : it doesn’t make variables from everything in the DOM.

By: stoyan

stoyan — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 20:52:02 +0000

@jaysmith @willbo
I didn’t think you can do anything useful with it (WillPeavy proves me wrong though), but more of a heads-up. Imagine your app dynamically creates a textarea with id=”description” after some user interaction. Somewhere else in the code you want to check if this textarea exists. So you go:

if (document.getElementById('description')){}

and IE will wrongly evaluate this to true because your SEO guy added meta tags and broke your app :)

@Schill – yes, it was dissapointing that other browsers have followed. I guess it was meant to help the developer, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions ;)

@Darkimmortal – yes, that’s the result of running the test page in Firefox – the only browser that didn’t create globals for no good reason.

By: jdalton

jdalton — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 19:25:28 +0000

additional info can be found:
.
http://www.jibbering.com/faq/#propertyAccess

By: SubtleGradient

SubtleGradient — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 19:25:10 +0000

Do you have more than 1 browser installed?

Nonsense like this is why everyone I know has long ago stopped reading Ajaxian.

By: Darkimmortal

Darkimmortal — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:29:28 +0000

description: undefined
robots: undefined
paragraph-id: undefined
paragraph-name: undefined
form-name: undefined
form-id: undefined
input-name: undefined
input-id: undefined
link-name: undefined
link-id: undefined
div-name: undefined
div-id: undefined

By: Schill

Schill — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:18:57 +0000

“tags” (and unsurprisingly, “all”) are other “reserved”-type keywords that IE doesn’t like – or rather, has native DOM ties. I’m surprised that description shows up in other browsers, though; didn’t expect that.

By: sentientholon

sentientholon — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:18:10 +0000

My understanding was that IE browsers will always look at the name property for getElementById(), not just in meta tags.

By: WillPeavy

WillPeavy — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:12:45 +0000

@jaysmith + willbo: I’ve used something like this on a project where I had to customize a third party app, but didn’t have direct access to metas.

By: willbo

willbo — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 16:18:06 +0000

@jaysmith: More to the point, SHOULD we do anything with it? Likely answer is no.

By: jaysmith

jaysmith — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:49:59 +0000

Chris,
what are the applications of this easter egg? Could we do anything useful with this data?