- From: Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc>
- Date: Wed, 02 Apr 2008 03:20:10 -0700
- To: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
- Cc: Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky@mit.edu>, "Web APIs WG (public)" <public-webapi@w3.org>
Henri Sivonen wrote: > > On Apr 2, 2008, at 12:44, Jonas Sicking wrote: >>> And to what end? To use indexing instead of list-style iteration. >> >> Exactly. Something that I would imagine is quite commonly done. Note >> that we're not just talking iterating over a full DOM tree, we're also >> talking about navigating around in a DOM tree from one known specific >> node to another. > > It seems to me that allowing indexed access to children creates a > similar kind of problem that allowing indexed access to strings by > UTF-16 code unit has created. Allowing app code to index into platform > structures that are most commonly forward-iterated seems like an > anti-pattern in terms of what implementation constraints are placed if > the impression that the app developer gets is that indexing has the > performance properties of array access and that it is OK to write app > code with that assumption. What makes you think that most users of the DOM-tree does forward-iteration? This is not my experience with the code I've seen. Rather it has been trying to get to specific nodes within a tree. The same argument can be made for .nextElementSibling, why give forward-iterating access into platform structures that are most commonly index-accessed? / Jonas
Received on Wednesday, 2 April 2008 10:21:15 UTC