DOMStrings don't contain "characters"

[bzbarsky]

There are various places in this specification that talk about things like "If the first character of details.total.amount.value is U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS" where the thing under conisideration (in this case details.total.amount.value) is a DOMString. DOMStrings contain code units, not characters. You either need to talk about the numeric values of those code units, or use USVString and talk about characters or something.

[domenic]

I dunno this is pretty widespread in web specs. E.g. just Ctrl+Fing for "character" in the multipage HTML page I had open in one tab landed me on https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/webappapis.html#dom-atob . Maybe we should move away from this term in general. Especially given HTML's confusing definition. But it's an understandable way of writing specs.

[bzbarsky]

Maybe we need to define what "character" means for a DOMString somewhere, then. For ASCII cases it's not too bad.

[marcoscaceres]

Blocked on whatwg/webidl#312