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Bug 8046 - Reflecting floats: The IDL attribute types include +/-Infinity, so it doesn't make sense to talk about floats being "out of range" because everything is within the infinite range
Summary: Reflecting floats: The IDL attribute types include +/-Infinity, so it doesn't...
Status: CLOSED WONTFIX
Alias: None
Product: HTML WG
Classification: Unclassified
Component: pre-LC1 HTML5 spec (editor: Ian Hickson) (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: Other other
: P3 normal
Target Milestone: LC
Assignee: Ian 'Hixie' Hickson
QA Contact: HTML WG Bugzilla archive list
URL: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/...
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2009-10-25 00:11 UTC by contributor
Modified: 2010-10-04 14:33 UTC (History)
5 users (show)

See Also:

Attachments

Description contributor 2009-10-25 00:11:18 UTC 
Section: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#reflecting-content-attributes-in-idl-attributes

Comment:
Reflecting floats: The IDL attribute types include +/-Infinity, so it doesn't make sense to talk about floats being "out of range" because everything is within the infinite range

Posted from: 212.183.134.209
Comment 1 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2009-10-25 08:24:03 UTC 
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the tracker issue; or you may create a tracker issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document:
   http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html

Status: Rejected
Change Description: no spec change
Rationale: What terminology would you suggest instead?
Comment 2 Philip Taylor 2009-10-25 09:07:38 UTC 
I'd just remove all the range-related references, i.e. delete the phrases "and the value is in the range of the IDL attribute's type" and "or returns an out of range value".

(I'm assuming the string "1e+400" will be converted into the floating point value Infinity, because that's how large values are meant to be handled in floating point, and assuming there should be no special handling for out-of-finite-range values here.)
Comment 3 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2009-10-25 09:20:32 UTC 
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the tracker issue; or you may create a tracker issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document:
   http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html

Status: Rejected
Change Description: no spec change
Rationale: None of the places that use this want infinite values — they all want finite values. I've made the spec explicitly exclude infinities from the "range" comment, but making numbers map to Infinity seems wrong, and would screw up the places that are using this.

In fact, 1e+400 is not Infinity, it is infinitely far away from Infinity. 0 would be a better approximation, in terms of the absolute error (100% error if it was rounded to zero, ∞% error if it was rounded to infinity...).