Expand the documentation for DOMString.

There was some confusion on IRC about its purpose; hopefully this will clarify
the situation.
This commit is contained in:
Ms2ger 2016-07-19 09:56:42 +02:00
parent 701e678d8e
commit 94fabbc366

View file

@ -113,6 +113,41 @@ pub fn is_token(s: &[u8]) -> bool {
}
/// A DOMString.
///
/// This type corresponds to the [`DOMString`](idl) type in WebIDL.
///
/// [idl]: https://heycam.github.io/webidl/#idl-DOMString
///
/// Cenceptually, a DOMString has the same value space as a JavaScript String,
/// i.e., an array of 16-bit *code units* representing UTF-16, potentially with
/// unpaired surrogates present (also sometimes called WTF-16).
///
/// Currently, this type stores a Rust `String`, in order to avoid issues when
/// integrating with the rest of the Rust ecosystem and even the rest of the
/// browser itself.
///
/// However, Rust `String`s are guaranteed to be valid UTF-8, and as such have
/// a *smaller value space* than WTF-16 (i.e., some JavaScript String values
/// can not be represented as a Rust `String`). This introduces the question of
/// what to do with values being passed from JavaScript to Rust that contain
/// unpaired surrogates.
///
/// The hypothesis is that it does not matter much how exactly those values are
/// transformed, because passing unpaired surrogates into the DOM is very rare.
/// In order to test this hypothesis, Servo will panic when encountering any
/// unpaired surrogates on conversion to `DOMString` by default. (The command
/// line option `-Z replace-surrogates` instead causes Servo to replace the
/// unpaired surrogate by a U+FFFD replacement character.)
///
/// Currently, the lack of crash reports about this issue provides some
/// evidence to support the hypothesis. This evidence will hopefully be used to
/// convince other browser vendors that it would be safe to replace unpaired
/// surrogates at the boundary between JavaScript and native code. (This would
/// unify the `DOMString` and `USVString` types, both in the WebIDL standard
/// and in Servo.)
///
/// This type is currently `!Send`, in order to help with an independent
/// experiment to store `JSString`s rather than Rust `String`s.
#[derive(Clone, Debug, Eq, Hash, HeapSizeOf, Ord, PartialEq, PartialOrd)]
pub struct DOMString(String);