Hi, Daniel-
I definitely see your use case and think it would be a valuable
addition, but I agree with Björn's characterization.
Part of the rationale with not having a nodeList was to make this a very
lightweight interface, and that was reinforced through comments on this
list. I had initially introduced a nodeList in this incarnation of the
spec, but received negative feedback about it, which is why I did the
next best thing (from my perspective) in adding 'childElementCount' instead.
Björn is also correct that the Selectors API spec will add that kind of
discrete itemized access to browsers, so I am reluctant to reintroduce a
nodeList to Element Traversal.
There are also existing implementations that follow the spec as it is,
so while that's an unfortunate situation --implementations should really
only be shipped in production code after the spec is considered stable,
in CR-- it is contraindicative of so fundamental a change. It would
also necessitate another LC period.
However, I am merely the editor, so I leave it to the WG to decide.
On the other hand, if you're satisfied that your desired functionality
will be otherwise available via the Selectors API or XPath, as Björn
points out, then you could withdraw your comment. Please let me know
your preference.
Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote (on 3/28/08 11:47 AM):
* Daniel Glazman wrote:
1. congrats for this spec, I love it ; I can't count how many times in
page or chrome script I am filtering out nodes that are not element
nodes.
2. the ElementTraversal interface has a |childElementCount| attribute
but misses access to an individual childElement based on its index.
That would be really useful. Two solutions here :
a. you remove the childElementCount attribute in favor of a
readonly attribute NodeList childElements;
and that NodeList has all we need
It was the SVG Working Group that originally came up with the interface
and they, as I understand it, decided against having any NodeList in the
SVG Tiny 1.2 DOM. They rather introduced the interface to allow imple-
mentations to discard some nodes like comments and text nodes with only
white space while keeping compatibility with implementations that keep
them. I would imagine they would be unhappy with such a change.
b. you add
Node item(in unsigned long index);
but that is not really consistent with the existing way of
querying list of nodes.
My very strong preference goes to solution a.
At the least you would need a different name as this would go on all
element nodes and you would probably run into name clashes quickly, and
confuse authors (NodeList.item vs. Element.item for example). However,
you could also just use XPath, or Selectors, or one of the many other
methods for this particular case, I don't think this addition is needed.
--
Regards-
-Doug Schepers
W3C Team Contact, SVG, CDF, and WebAPI
