Hi

On 9/19/23 08:35, Stephen Reay wrote:
Regarding the private constructor: I understand the issue with the *old* class being 
confusing - but your new class doesn't have that issue, because there are no 
"loadXXX" methods: as you said, if you're loading an existing document, you're 
forced to do it via the static factory methods. With that change alone, there's zero risk 
of confusion in allowing direct constructor calls, because once the object is 
instantiated there is no subsequent way to load a document and inadvertently change the 
encoding.

Having a regular constructor and then one or more factory methods for specific cases is 
already a concept in PHP (i.e. DateTime[Immutable]'s  `createFromXXX` as well as a 
constructor), and IMO needing to call a factory method to get an "empty" 
document seems out of place in PHP - it seems a bit like a Java-ism - using a factory, 
where one just isn't required.


I was one of the persons who discussed this updated API with Niels in private and looking up the discussion it was me who proposed making the constructor private and just providing named constructors.

From the perspective of the user of the API, I like the symmetry between all the named constructors:

Whenever I want to create a new document, I use one of the fromXyz() methods. And when I use those, I get exactly what it says on the tin.

Making the regular constructor available for use would effectively make whatever that constructor does a special case / the default case. This makes sense for DateTimeImmutable, because the __construct() variant is likely much more often used than the various createFromXyz() variants. For the HtmlDocument I find it less obvious that creating an empty document would be the default case compared to loading an existing document from a file.

We should probably rename the named constructors to include the "create" prefix for consistency with DTI though.

Best regards
Tim Düsterhus

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