Re: XPath as CSS-selectors?

Asbjørn Ulsberg wrote:
> This is of course an issue that almost all replies have
> mentioned, but let's be serious; isn't this the developer's
> responsibility? If he's such a moron that he uses dynamic
> scripting with XPath/CSS, and this takes like 30 minutes to
> render on his PC, it's really his problem.

 From the point of view of the web developer and the UA user, any 
non-instantaneous response to anything is a bug in the UA.  I've run 
into a goodly number of bug reports I've seen that start with "This is 
really slow in all the browsers I've tested it with, but I'm filing this 
bug anyway" and then proceed to present algorithmically slow JS.

So face it, if you give people a way to shoot themselves in the foot 
they _will_ do it.  And then scream at you for letting them do it.

That's another way to look at the performance complaint -- CSS selectors 
make it very difficult to shoot yourself in the foot performance wise, 
while XPath makes it very very easy.  And these have been design goals 
of the two selector languages up to this point.

> This goes for anything stupid that can be done with ECMAScript;
> and there can be done (and is being done) *extremely* much
> stupid, I tell yer!

Sounds like you've had experiences similar to mine... ;)

-Boris

Received on Friday, 20 June 2003 05:26:53 UTC