Re: Some way to change an element's name would be useful

On Aug 29, 2011, at 23:29 , Dimitri Glazkov wrote:
> Document.renameNode seems cool. Aside from the awkward user data
> event, it matches perfectly the needs of the Component Model (updated
> to reference it here:
> http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Component_Model#Performance).
> 
> I am curious why no one had implemented this. We should dust it off,
> add a normal event to it, and set it sail.

Well, the specification for renameNode is more or less: "you should do something that, you know, sort of removes the node, unless you don't want to which is also, you know, okay". Just with a quick scan:

    • sometimes you can rename the document element, sometimes you can't;
    • might change the name and return the same node, but sometimes it might return a different one;
    • depending on the above, it's unclear whether or not you get the same mutation events depending on whether it's the same node being renamed or a new one being created;
    • defaulted attributes for the new element/new name may or may not be added.

That's not very friendly, to say the least. For reasons I don't quite understand this is also a method of Document when it would make much more sense on Element (we can forget about Attr). All in all, I think we'd be doing ourselves a favour by deprecating renameNode() and specifying a new one.

-- 
Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ - @robinberjon

Received on Tuesday, 30 August 2011 08:44:52 UTC