Re: [selectors-api] Why have two identical differently named interfaces?

>  > On 12/03/2008, Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky@mit.edu> wrote:
>  >> I guess I could do the two interfaces, but I'm having a hard time
>  >> seeing
>  >> different extensions being made to these two interfaces (as
>  > opposed to wholly
>  >> new interfaces being invented, as was done here).

>  On Mar 12, 2008, at 8:46 AM, liorean wrote:
>  > I can actually imagine one extension that only makes sence on elements
>  > and not on any other nodes - element-rooted instead of
>  > subtree-only-but-document-rooted queries. (I don't see any real
>  > benefit from such an interface though, but I've seen the idea
>  > mentioned on the mailing lists.)

On 13/03/2008, Alex Russell <alex@dojotoolkit.org> wrote:
> The benefit here is the (potential) ability to root queries to
>  containing nodes. Nearly every JavaScript library that does CSS
>  selectors handles the equivalent of:
>
>         node.querySelectorAll("> .thinger");
>
>  Which currently has no expression via valid CSS 3 selectors. There's
>  no concept of a query being a descendant of a selector root node
>  although the above use-case occurs very frequently in real-world
>  scripts.

Yes, but that use case has a trivial solution in document-rooted
context: determine the ID or if not present generate an ID for the
current node, query for a document-rooted "#ID > .thinger" and then if
you had to generate an ID, remove it.

In the context of HTML5 scoped style elements I did have an idea that
could be subverted for this case as well. The idae was basically a
::scope-root pseudo-element that encompassed the downwards sibling
tree of the scoped style element. This pseudo-element could be equally
useful in the Selectors API.

(I think I first mentioned it in
<uri:http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007Jun/0069.html>.
The threading is sadly slightly broken in the archives though (usualy
suspect is Outlook), so it's hard to follow the entire discussion.)

>  It seems foolish to extend the CSS 3 selectors WD to support a syntax
>  that is simple-selector free, whereas it has use in the DOM-centric
>  APIs.

Or in scoped style elements in HTML5... I still think explicit is
better than implicit though, with the added benefit that it will not
require changes to the basic algorithms of current selectors
implementations.
-- 
David "liorean" Andersson

Received on Thursday, 13 March 2008 13:05:32 UTC