Re: Improving DOM Traversal and DOM XPath

On 04/26/2011 12:22 AM, Ojan Vafai wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 25, 2011 at 11:31 AM, Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc> wrote:
>
>     First off is document.createTreeWalker and
>     document.createNodeIterator. They have the same signature which
>     currently is:
>
>     document.createX(root, whatToShow, filter, entityReferenceExpansion);
>
>     Given that entity references are being removed, we should simply
>     remove the last argument. Note that this is a backwards compatible
>     change since additional arguments to any DOM function are just ignored
>     in all browsers I think. Additionally, I see no reason to keep the
>     'filter' argument required as it's quite common to leave out.
>
>
> FWIW, WebKit already has filter and entityReferenceExpansion as
> optional. I expect there would be no opposition to making whatToShow
> optional as well.

Just curious, are they optional by design in webkit, or because of the
bug which for example lead the last parameter to
addEventListener to be optional.

-Olli




>
>     We could even make the whatToShow argument optinal and default it to
>     SHOW_ALL. Originally I was going to propose that we default it to
>     SHOW_ELEMENTS as I had thought that that would be a common value,
>     however it appears that SHOW_TEXT is as, if not more, commonly used.
>     The downside to defaulting to SHOW_ALL is that people might use the
>     default and then do filtering manually, which is slower than having
>     the iterator/treewalker do the filtering.
>
>
> I agree with everything here. I think SHOW_ALL is the default people
> would expect.
>
>     I'd like to give some DOM XPath a similar treatment. The following
>     three functions could be simplified:
>
>     XPathEvaluator.createExpression(expression, resolver);
>     Here I think we can make the 'resolver' argument optional as
>     namespaces are commonly not used on the web.
>
>     XPathEvaluator.evaluate(expression, contextNode, resolver, type,
>     result);
>     We can make 'resolver', 'type' and 'result' optional. 'type' would
>     default to ANY_TYPE(0) and the other two to null.
>
>     XPathExpression.evaluate(contextNode, type, result);
>     Here all but the first could be optional. The defaults would be the
>     same as for XPathEvaluator.evaluate.
>
>
> These are already all optional in WebKit. We could also make contextNode
> optional by defaulting it to the document, no?
>
>     I'd like to make these changes to firefox, but first I wanted to hear
>     what people here think.
>
>
> I support this. As it is, I believe the verbosity of these methods hurts
> their adoption.
>
>     I know we don't have editors for the relevant
>     specs, but I think we can make an informal decision that these changes
>     sound good if people think they are.
>
>     / Jonas
>
>

Received on Monday, 25 April 2011 21:38:02 UTC