DOM idiosyncracies and made-up tag names

My question no doubt reflects several misunderstandings, but perhaps
someone can unburden me of at least some of those.

 

Back many months ago, I pointed out some DOM idiosyncrasies that I
observed across browsers [1]. There was some brief debate over whether
those mattered or not, but ultimately Dan C. put them on a  little list
of action items he was keeping for the WG. By the time the Issue Tracker
came into existence, the issue had apparently been resolved to someone's
satisfaction as I do not see it (by any label I would recognize it at
least) on the list there. Perhaps those that thought it was not an issue
convinced those who did that it really wasn't after all, and I am
prepared to live naively and happily with those browser inconsistencies
in perpetuity. One might conclude that is a part of the charm of HTML.

 

At any rate, a couple of weeks ago I started building a little proof of
concept for a proposed tag for SVG. I found that in all browsers I could
type my little invented tag into the markup, and then use script to find
all such tags, vacuum out their attributes and repopulate the DOM with
real SVG according to how the invented tag was supposed to work. No one
ever told me that I wasn't supposed to invent my own little tags, and
seeing that it worked so nicely, I thought, "hmmm.... I wonder if this
would work in HTML." It reminded me a bit of discussions going on in
WHATWG in the last day or two about JavaScript libraries like Dojo being
used to invent tags. It seemed like some folks didn't like that.

 

Anyhow, I cobbled together the little experiment [2] with code sort of
like this:

<mySelect>

<myO>One</myO>

<myO>Two</myO>

<myO>Three</myO>

<myO>Four</myO>

</mySelect>

 

 All browsers seem to be able to "correctly" find var
MS=document.getElementsByTagName("mySelect").

 

All but IE(7) seem to be able to find the four <myO>'s inside the
<mySelect>.

 

All the others seem to agree (on odd numbers, however) for the number of
children inside the artificial tag:  9.

 

It is reassuring to me to see that the enumeration of objects in the
document by the other browsers for [1] however still remains wildly
divergent. Opera finds 134; IE 94; FF 148;  Chrome and Safari refuse
even to sit at that particular table.

 

So I guess I might now repose the original question: is any of this an
issue or not?

 

Cheers

David

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007JanMar/0282.html


[2] http://srufaculty.sru.edu/david.dailey/html/mySelects.htm