Re: Special group of functions for NON-ELEMENT nodes in document

Master Br wrote:
> Hi, everybody
> I use only Mozilla Firefox for almost 2 years, and I noticed that it's
> javascript sees more childNodes than other browsers, because it
> considers textnodes and commentnodes too...
>
> It would be good if W3C Standards had *2 groups of methods* to deal
> with nodes:
>
> In the Basic group, *firstChild, lastChild and childNodes[n]* as "most
> browsers do", should deal ONLY with ELEMENT NODES... ignoring the rest
> In a Special group, (for instance:) *firstChildSp, lastChildSp and
> childNodesSp[n]* would return ALL TYPES OF NODES.
>
> This way,* ONLY if a programmer is interested in all nodes, including
> the textnodes *(that in general only disturb the process) he will use
> the special functions that end with "Sp" an return ANY type of nodes.
>
> Sp meaning Special, because it will consider textnodes, elementnodes
> and commentnodes...
>
> In the Basic group, *firstChild, lastChild and childNodes[n]* as "most
> browsers do", should deal ONLY with ELEMENT NODES... ignoring the rest
I agree that dealing with element content is a very common use case, and
the first thing I do when writing an XML app is a filter method or two
that skips non-element content.

I believe that this was the purpose of the traversal API, to be able to
more-easily traverse for this sort of use case.  I do not really know
how practical it is to add APIs in the base for all such cases, even the
common ones like element content.

I do not know any more (at this point, because it has been so long since
I looked at it) how well traversal addresses this use case or whether
having the extra object around was too big of a problem, because I have
never been confident enough that traversal API was present in a
particular implementation to try it.

Ray

Received on Monday, 25 September 2006 13:16:00 UTC