On Feb 11, 2009, at 12:14 PM, Kartikaya Gupta wrote:
I updated to Safari 3.2 on Windows (which looks it also has WebKit
525.27.1) and you're right, it is now showing "number" instead of
"object". I guess this was changed not too long ago. So then my
question is: why was it changed?
No, this was not changed.
I don't understand why you were getting that strange result, but
WebKit has always shown "number" for this. I went back to old
versions, including digging out a copy of Safari 2 and every version I
tested yields a number. There was never any code that attempted to
return anything except a number.
More to the point, there's also a false premise in the specification's
claim that this should be a Date. The Date class in JavaScript boils
down to a double for its internal representation; I believe that's by
design and not just a detail of the WebKit implementation. So the
claim that a number, also a double, can't handle the entire range of
DOMTimestamp, but the Date class can is probably incorrect. Maybe
someone can give a specific example with details of how this would go
wrong — I don’t think there is any such example.
-- Darin
