Re: innerHTML in DocumentFragment

On 4/11/11 10:03 AM, Yehuda Katz wrote:
> It would be useful if there was a way to take a String of HTML and 
> parse it into a document fragment. This should work even if the HTML 
> string contains elements that are invalid in the "in body" insertion 
> mode.
>
> Something like this code should work:
>
>   var frag = document.createDocumentFragment();
>   frag.innerHTML = "<tr><td>hello</td></tr>"
>   someTable.appendChild(frag)
>
> At present, this can sometimes be achieved if the context of the HTML 
> string is known in advance. However, this is not always the case. For 
> instance, jQuery supplies an API that looks like this:
>
>   $("html string").appendTo("#table")
>
> At the time that jQuery is creating the document fragment for the HTML 
> string, it does not yet know what its context will be. This approach 
> is used in order to enable convenient setup code. Here is a very 
> contrived example to illustrate the point:
>
>   var frag = $("html string")
>
>   // replace the HTML content of a descendent <span> with the contents 
> of its data-title attribute
>   frag.find("span[data-title]").html(function() { return 
> this.attr("data-title"); })
>
>   html.appendTo("#table")
>
> In general, this makes it easier to build abstractions that work with 
> Strings of HTML, without always needing to make sure consumers of the 
> abstraction know and pass in the existing context.
>
> This would probably require a new, laxer insertion mode, which would 
> behave similarly to the body insertion mode, but with different 
> semantics in the "/A start tag whose tag name is one of: "caption", 
> "col", "colgroup", "frame", "head", "tbody", "td", "tfoot", "th", 
> "thead", "tr""/ case. One way to handle those cases would be to 
> immediately enter an appropriate insertion mode if an unexpected tag 
> was found. For instance, if a start tr tag was encountered "at the 
> root", the parser could go into "in table" or "in table body" 
> insertion mode instead of treating it like a parse error and ignoring 
> the token.
>

It would also be great to have some notification of the parser error - a 
console warning might be most appropriate. This would be a great aid 
when debugging functions that generate html. This feature is probably up 
to the browser vendors though.

Sean