Re: innerHTML in DocumentFragment

This sounds like an excellent idea. Chromium / WebKit had an issue with
this in regards to copy & paste because some applications where inserting
table-element-less tables into clipboard, and HTML5 parsing algorithm was
stripping them out.

- Ryosuke

On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 4:03 PM, Yehuda Katz <wycats@gmail.com> wrote:

> It would be useful if there was a way to take a String of HTML and parse
> it into a document fragment. This should work even if the HTML string
> contains elements that are invalid in the "in body" insertion mode.
>
> Something like this code should work:
>
>   var frag = document.createDocumentFragment();
>   frag.innerHTML = "<tr><td>hello</td></tr>"
>    someTable.appendChild(frag)
>
> At present, this can sometimes be achieved if the context of the HTML
> string is known in advance. However, this is not always the case. For
> instance, jQuery supplies an API that looks like this:
>
>   $("html string").appendTo("#table")
>
> At the time that jQuery is creating the document fragment for the HTML
> string, it does not yet know what its context will be. This approach is
> used in order to enable convenient setup code. Here is a very contrived
> example to illustrate the point:
>
>   var frag = $("html string")
>
>   // replace the HTML content of a descendent <span> with the contents of
> its data-title attribute
>   frag.find("span[data-title]").html(function() { return
> this.attr("data-title"); })
>
>   html.appendTo("#table")
>
> In general, this makes it easier to build abstractions that work with
> Strings of HTML, without always needing to make sure consumers of the
> abstraction know and pass in the existing context.
>
> This would probably require a new, laxer insertion mode, which would
> behave similarly to the body insertion mode, but with different semantics
> in the "*A start tag whose tag name is one of: "caption", "col",
> "colgroup", "frame", "head", "tbody", "td", "tfoot", "th", "thead", "tr""* case.
> One way to handle those cases would be to immediately enter an appropriate
> insertion mode if an unexpected tag was found. For instance, if a start tr
> tag was encountered "at the root", the parser could go into "in table" or
> "in table body" insertion mode instead of treating it like a parse error
> and ignoring the token.
>
> -- Yehuda
>
>
> --
> Yehuda Katz
> (ph) 718.877.1325
>