- From: Johan Sundström <oyasumi@gmail.com>
- Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2012 23:00:49 -0700
- To: Stewart Brodie <stewart.brodie@antplc.com>
- Cc: whatwg@whatwg.org
On Tue, Oct 30, 2012 at 3:20 AM, Stewart Brodie <stewart.brodie@antplc.com> wrote: >> Hi everybody! >> >> Serializing a complete HTML document DOM to a string is surprisingly >> hard in javascript. > > Does XMLSerializer().serializeToString(document) not meet your requirement? Ah – good thinking. (new XMLSerializer).serializeToString(document) does indeed do a pretty excellent job of it, including the crazy hacks people do with conditional comments outside of the root node, which I hadn't figured I would be able to piece back together from an already parsed page. While I hate to admit it, maybe on some level there is benefit to much of the DOM APIs being javascript hostile to force you towards the occasional really well-paved paths like the above, when you can find them. My use case was taking as good a snapshot of an already live web page's structure from a non-privileged bookmarklet, for archival purposes (i e essentially what a curl of the page would do). For my purposes, it is a bonus that I actually get the current state of the page with whatever DOM mods have transpired since it loaded rather than what curl would produce, so I think XMLSerializer is a good friend. That said, I would still much enjoy a future where javascript:alert(document.doctype) would tell you something rich about the page that we today need deep knowledge of document.compatMode and/or combinations of XMLSerializer and parsers, or deep study of DocumentType refdocs to tease out. Is there a case against it in people using it where they ought to pick other solutions? -- / Johan Sundström, http://ecmanaut.blogspot.com/ > -- > Stewart Brodie > Team Leader - ANT Galio Browser > ANT Software Limited
Received on Wednesday, 31 October 2012 06:01:20 UTC