503468 - canPlayType should return "", not "no"

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: Audio/Video, defect)

Description

[Robert O'Callahan (:roc) (email my personal email if necessary)]

Hixie just made this change. We should make it ASAP and ram it into 1.9.1, since sites will have to be adjusted for it.

The reason for this change is that it's completely natural to write "if (v.canPlayType(...))" or "if (!v.canPlayType(...))". And thanks to JS string->bool conversion, this happily always passes (or always fails) for all possible return values. This issue was brought up on the whatwg list ages ago, but Hixie forgot to change the spec.

By returning "" instead of "no", simple uses of canPlayType will treat "no" as false and basically do what the author expects.

Comment 1

[Robert O'Callahan (:roc) (email my personal email if necessary)]

Attachment: fix

Comment 2

[Samuel Sidler (old account; do not CC)]

Yeah, let's block on this... needs review soon though.

Comment 3

[Peter Van der Beken [:peterv]]

http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/831a02b18da0

Comment 4

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

Comment on attachment 387822 [details] [diff] [review]
fix

Has to wait for 1.9.1.12

Comment 5

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

Comment on attachment 387822 [details] [diff] [review]
fix

a=beltzner, please land on mozilla-1.9.1

Comment 6

[Robert O'Callahan (:roc) (email my personal email if necessary)]

http://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-1.9.1/rev/6180a70604f1

Comment 7

[Tony Chung [:tchung]]

Verified on Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1.2) Gecko/20090729 Firefox/3.5.2.  Patch has testcases

Comment 8

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

Mass change: adding fixed1.9.2 keyword

(This bug was identified as a mozilla1.9.2 blocker which was fixed before the mozilla-1.9.2 repository was branched (August 13th, 2009) as per this query: http://is.gd/2ydcb - if this bug is not actually fixed on mozilla1.9.2, please remove the keyword. Apologies for the bugspam)