Re: Simplifying element creation

On Tue 04 Oct 2011 11:18:18 AM CEST, Dominic Cooney wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 5:30 PM, Anne van Kesteren<annevk@opera.com>  wrote:
>> So far we discussed having Element.create() and having new methods on Node
>> that would be more practical than what we have today. Maybe we should
>> combine these in some way? Charles proposed some kind of JSON serialization,
>> but I do not think it makes sense to tie it to JSON.
>>
>> It could be something like this:
>>
>> ELEMENT = [NAME, optional ATTRS, optional EVENT_HANDLERS, TEXT | ELEMENT
>> ...]
>>
>> E.g.<div>Hello<a href="/">World</a></div>  is represented as:
>>
>>   ["div", "Hello ", ["a", {href:"/"}, "World"]]
>
> This is good in that it doesn't require any new bound identifiers.
>
> I think readability suffers a bit because element names and text are
> both strings.
>
> If you want to pass a list of children as a parameter, there is also
> no good serialization for it. Using a list is weak because it is the
> same type as an element.

You can use Element.append.apply. It's not wonderful but it's OK I 
think.
> What about using constructor functions for elements? [HTMLDivElement,
> 'Hello ', [HTMLAElement, {href: '/'}, 'World']].

That doesn't work because they're not constructor functions; they're 
interface objects and multiple elements can have the same interface 
(HTMLHeadingElement for example).