Re: with and scope chain augmentation

On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 12:02 PM, Brendan Eich<brendan@...> wrote:
Isn't it funny how something that seems small can have such a large
effect? This misfeature doesn't seem to have a good role or use cases.
It seems a bit like the callable collections that MSIE started.

If HTML 5 author(s) only had the hindsight to see the problems with
their inventions. I don't expect much at this point.

> The nested DOM object scopes for event handlers was something I did to allow
> brevity in inline event handler code. On balance it was a mistake, but it
> was so popular that the VXML spec actually goes nuts and reifies nested XML
> tags as objects on the scope chain for its ES scripting model!
>

Chrome actually shows the source code for the onclick using "with".

Taking that document linked,
javascript:document.write("<xmp
onclick="foo()">",(Function.prototype.toString.call(document.getElementsByTagName("xmp")[0].onclick),"<\/xmp>");

results:

function onclick(evt) {
  with (this.ownerDocument ? this.ownerDocument : {}) {
    with (this.form ? this.form : {}) {
      with (this) {
        return (function(evt){
self.alert([window.tagName, document.tagName])
}).call(this, evt);
      }
    }
  }
}

> This makes for a confusing tower of scopes. You can't always see the
> bindings, since an XML or HTML doc can be large. With the DOM, pieces of the
> namespace can be bound implicitly or in obscure ways. And "unobtrusive
> JavaScript" favors no event handler code bodies at all.
>
> So yeah: "don't do that" (don't use strict mode for any with hacks that
> emulate bad old web APIs such as event handler scope).
>

Not using bad old web APIs is also an alternative.

Garrett
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