`document.defaultView` => `window`

Reported by:	paul.irish	Owned by:	rwaldron
Priority:	low	Milestone:	1.8
Component:	css	Version:	git
Keywords:		Cc:
Blocked by:		Blocking:

Description

grabbing getComputedStyle off of defaultView has been commonplace for many years, but its unnecessary.

the same function has worked off the global window object all the way back, AFAICT.

I posted about this on g+ ...

oftentimes you see document.defaultView.getComputedStyle used instead of the getComputedStyle that's on the window object. I imagine that's because the spec'd "interface" that getComputedStyle was defined for defaultView before it was decided that the global object inherited the defaultView interface. http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-Style/css.html#CSS-OverrideAndComputed

Regardless, we now have a lot of code with this defaultView action, but I feel like its unnecessary. Funnily enough, check out this confused code example from PPK:

else if (window.getComputedStyle)
var y = document.defaultView.getComputedStyle(x,null).getPropertyValue(styleProp);

~via http://www.quirksmode.org/dom/getstyles.html

Does anyone know the last browser that had gCS available on d.dV but not on window?

and david baron responded...

>> I don't think there were any. I'd guess the whole defaultView business was some combination of (1) not wanting to write a spec for window and (2) making an API that was also usable in Java.

grabbing the more convenient gCS will kill off a lot of bytes and some extra conditional complexity.

Attachments (0)

Change History (8)

Changed September 28, 2011 09:27PM UTC by rwaldron comment:1

component:	unfiled → css
milestone:	None → 1.next
owner:	→ rwaldron
priority:	undecided → low
status:	new → assigned

Changed September 28, 2011 10:25PM UTC by rwaldron comment:2

https://github.com/rwldrn/jquery/pull/new/10373

Changed May 14, 2012 05:08PM UTC by mikesherov comment:3

milestone:	1.next → 1.8

can you please resubmit this now that FF3.6 is gone?

Changed June 11, 2012 10:01PM UTC by dmethvin comment:4

In at least a few places, it seems we're doing this because the element we're interrogating may be in another frame. So it's not the global window object. There isn't a lot to be gained in any case, since there are very few uses at this point. I would be happy with this just being closed if there isn't a compelling reason to make changes.

Changed June 18, 2012 05:27PM UTC by Rick Waldron comment:5

resolution:	→ fixed
status:	assigned → closed

Update document.defaultView.getComputedStyle. Fixes #10373

Changeset: f7ee1f6e59f0b465f5f64bf6ac52108e445efaac

Changed November 07, 2012 05:29PM UTC by brian.moschel@gmail.com comment:6

This breaks for a test framework I work on: FuncUnit. FuncUnit opens a popup window with the application under test, and the parent window runs commands in that window. In IE, window.getComputedStyle(elem) breaks, because window is the opener window, but elem is in the popup window. elem.ownerDocument.defaultView.getComputedStyle(elem) works fine, because it gets the relevant document. Can the window part of this commit be reverted for this reason?

Changed November 08, 2012 01:52AM UTC by dmethvin comment:7

@brian, can you create a new ticket for this? It seems like it would be reasonable. A simple test case would help as well.

Changed July 18, 2013 04:25PM UTC by anonymous comment:8

Replying to [comment:7 dmethvin]: