Re: XPath and find/findAll methods

Yehuda Katz
(ph) 718.877.1325


On Tue, Nov 22, 2011 at 2:13 PM, Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi@gmx.net> wrote:

> * Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
> >I know you're being somewhat hostile because you like XPath and we're
> >essentially saying "ignore XPath, it's dead", but still, you're
> >arguing badly.
> >
> >The web platform has a single selection syntax that has won without
> >question.
>
> When Robin starts referring to himself in the third person, pretends to
> represent some newspeak "web platform" and claims it's without question
> that he is right, then you could probably say he is arguing badly. Such
> sad attempts at manipulating the debate, and discouraging participation
> by people who might disagree, usually come from elsewhere though.
>
> >If it lacks some abilities, extending it is almost
> >certainly better for both implementations and authors than pulling in
> >a completely different selection syntax that is *almost* identical in
> >functionality but happens to include those abilities that were
> >lacking.  If this were any other pair of technologies, I highly doubt
> >you'd be able to make yourself argue that having two gratuitously
> >different syntaxes that authors have to regularly switch between based
> >on the exact property they want, and which can't be used together in
> >any simple way, is a good situation for us to create.  That's almost a
> >textbook example of valuing spec authors over everyone else.
>
> Selectors are even less expressive today than what was proposed at the
> time Robin brought this issue up the first time on www-style, over a de-
> cade ago, as far as document structure is concerned. The main thing the
> CSS Working Group has done since was printing some Selectors Fan shirts.
> I am not sure who that is valuing, but it's neither authors nor users.
>
> Your argument about languages is interesting of course. If you want to
> set styles statically, you use CSS syntax, but if you want to do so dy-
> namically, you have to use JavaScript syntax once you leave the trivial
> feature set of CSS syntax. Maybe using JavaScript syntax for both would
> be better, so authors don't have to learn a whole new language?


This is moot. Virtually all authors already know CSS ;)


> Authors might actually agree if they see future style sheets full of
> variables,
> mixins, media queries, feature detection rules, plus their jQuery codes
> to fill the styling gaps, that JSSS should have been the way to go.

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>