1. Posted by drayla on Fri, 30 May 2008 00:18:46

    Cant wait to get home from work today as the book is sitting on my porch... just had a quick question about a term i've been hearing alot since i started reading up on wow addons... 'Taint' from the context that its been used it sounds like it means just what it says... code/variables become tainted? meaning may or maynot contain the data or act the way they are expected to?

  2. Posted by jnwhiteh on Fri, 30 May 2008 00:18:46
    Cant wait to get home from work today as the book is sitting on my porch... just had a quick question about a term i've been hearing alot since i started reading up on wow addons... 'Taint' from the context that its been used it sounds like it means just what it says... code/variables become tainted? meaning may or maynot contain the data or act the way they are expected to?

    Actually it refers to the "security" of the code being executed.  For example, and Blizzard code initially starts untainted, while all addon code is tainted.  This is the basic system used by the UI system to determine what code is "Blizzard" and what code is not.  This allows them to define protected functions, which can only be called from "Blizzard" code.

    Chapter 17 is the start of the discussion about secure templates.  You can find the outline chapter for that page here: /chapters/first-edition/17.