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At the moment, according to the specs, if the IDL attribute of an enumerated attributes isn't limited to only known values, the IDL attribute should reflect the content attribute. In most case, it sounds better to have the IDL attribute reflecting the current state instead of reflecting the content attribute. It would prevent the caller to guess the current state depending on the value. This is a lost of time and effort and it is clearly not future-proof. At the moment, only three attributes are limited to only known values: - document.dir - keygen.keytype - area.shape Maybe other attributes could be limited to only known values ? Even, couldn't we image having a different default: every IDL attribute of an enumerated attribute could be limited to only known value except if the opposite is specified. IMO, it sounds natural to have IDL attributes returning the current state instead of the content attribute value.
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: Accepted Change Description: no spec change Rationale: This seems to have been fixed already.
(Specifically, most are now so limited.)