Re: [Element Traversal LC] access to element by index

Daniel Glazman wrote:
> 
>> I'm actually not sure.  How often do authors want to get the third 
>> child without knowing anything more about it than that it's an 
>> element? Iterating through the kids (by means of ET or '.childNodes') 
>> gives you much more context information (what type of element it is, 
>> what it's bbox is, whether or not it has text/child content, etc.).  
>> Not trying to be a pain, but can you identify a concrete use case?
> 
> [admin: please Cc me, I am not following this mailing-list]
> 
> I probably has to use it in my daily code - find the n-th child element
> of another given element - at least a dozen times in the last fifteen
> days. Iterating through the kids is a for my point of view pure bloat
> compared to myFooElement.childElements.item(3)...

I agree with Daniel, while I don't write a lot of javascript myself I've 
seen a number of cases like this in the javascript used to implement 
firefox:

bar = foo.parentNode.parentNode.childNodes.item(3).firstChild;

Basically I wonder why we wouldn't give access to items by index? 
Complexity of implementation really can't be an argument here, the 
amount of code to implement this is trivial, especially compared to all 
other things required by a browser or DOM implementation. Like Boris 
pointed out it's likely that an implementation could reuse existing 
code, but even if that isn't the case I would imagine that the code to 
implement this property is laughable compared to the code needed to draw 
an antialiased spline or implementing DOM events (part of which I use as 
a hiring interview question due to its complexity).

I remember in the initial releases of gecko we got a lot of support 
questions from people wondering why their DOM-using code didn't work in 
Netscape when it worked in IE. The reason was that IE didn't create DOM 
nodes for whitespace-only nodes and so the DOM was significantly 
different and harder to figure out where your nodes lived. 
getElementById helped to some extent here, and I think that recent 
development of javascript libraries has helped a lot too. However if we 
are arguing that people should use those solutions there really is no 
need for the ElementTraversal spec at all.

So I honestly can't understand the complexity argument at all. I think 
ElementTraversal is something that users really want and would be 
trivial to implement with or without .childElements. So there really is 
no need to cut corners and good arguments not to.

/ Jonas

Received on Wednesday, 2 April 2008 07:16:30 UTC