21823 2013-04-25 00:38:30 +0000 Having status always return empty string is not web-compatible 2013-06-06 20:03:37 +0000 1 1 1 Unclassified WHATWG HTML unspecified Other other RESOLVED FIXED http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#browser-interface-elements P3 normal Unsorted 1 contributor ian bzbarsky ian mike contributor oldest_to_newest 86756 0 contributor 2013-04-25 00:38:30 +0000 Specification: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/browsers.html Multipage: http://www.whatwg.org/C#browser-interface-elements Complete: http://www.whatwg.org/c#browser-interface-elements Referrer: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/ Comment: Having status always return empty string is not web-compatible Posted from: 98.110.194.206 by bzbarsky@mit.edu User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.8; rv:23.0) Gecko/20130419 Firefox/23.0 86757 1 bzbarsky 2013-04-25 00:42:03 +0000 In particular it breaks any script that uses an undeclared global variable named "status". See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=862540 and the sort of developer confusion it causes at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16138781/firefox-20-vs-google-charts-getvalue-oddness/16139309 As far as I can tell what UAs implement is that setting window.status saves the string and getting window.status returns the last value it was set to. Testcase: <pre><script> status = { toString: function() { document.writeln('yes'); return "I am here"; } } document.writeln(typeof status); document.writeln(status); </script> 88843 2 ian 2013-06-06 20:01:02 +0000 So sad. 88844 3 contributor 2013-06-06 20:03:37 +0000 Checked in as WHATWG revision r7920. Check-in comment: window.status compat http://html5.org/tools/web-apps-tracker?from=7919&to=7920