- From: Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky@MIT.EDU>
- Date: Wed, 08 Jul 2009 00:14:48 -0700
- To: Andrew Fedoniouk <news@terrainformatica.com>
- CC: HTML WG <public-html@w3.org>
Andrew Fedoniouk wrote: > I am not sure I understand how you would return the same instance > of NodeList for different elements that were used to invoke > getElementsByName() with. Oh, for different elements, sure. But then they would be observing mutations in different parts of the document, too... In any case, from what I've seen calling getElementsByTagName (which I assume you meant, since getElementsByName only exists on documents) on elements is a rare case. > To be honest that reasoning sounds like "to be compatible with design > flaws of our forefathers". No, it's "to be compatible with existings scripts that assume this behavior". > The road to programmer's hell is paved by "bug compatibility patches". And the road to XHTML2 is paved with the alternative in this case. > I think Web technology already got enough of those and you probably one of the best persons who know > this. I'm all in favor of removing any bugwards compatibility content doesn't depend on.... > In any case HTML5 highnesses decided to deprecate <font> and <frameset>. > Even deprecation will break the Web as there are no alternatives to > <frameset> splitter behavior. Deprecation doesn't mean that UAs stop implementing it. So that has nothing to do with the thing we're discussing here. > Back to the problem: I do not see what would be a problem to declare > getElementsByClassName() & friends as returning something like > StaticNodeList (: public NodeList) as one wise person put here: > > http://dev.w3.org/2006/webapi/selectors-api/draft/selectors-api.htm#staticnodelist It'd break existing pages. So it's a non-starter. -Boris
Received on Wednesday, 8 July 2009 07:15:38 UTC