Daniel Glazman wrote:
I'm actually not sure. How often do authors want to get the third
child without knowing anything more about it than that it's an
element? Iterating through the kids (by means of ET or '.childNodes')
gives you much more context information (what type of element it is,
what it's bbox is, whether or not it has text/child content, etc.).
Not trying to be a pain, but can you identify a concrete use case?
[admin: please Cc me, I am not following this mailing-list]
I probably has to use it in my daily code - find the n-th child element
of another given element - at least a dozen times in the last fifteen
days. Iterating through the kids is a for my point of view pure bloat
compared to myFooElement.childElements.item(3)...
I agree with Daniel, while I don't write a lot of javascript myself I've
seen a number of cases like this in the javascript used to implement
firefox:
bar = foo.parentNode.parentNode.childNodes.item(3).firstChild;
Basically I wonder why we wouldn't give access to items by index?
Complexity of implementation really can't be an argument here, the
amount of code to implement this is trivial, especially compared to all
other things required by a browser or DOM implementation. Like Boris
pointed out it's likely that an implementation could reuse existing
code, but even if that isn't the case I would imagine that the code to
implement this property is laughable compared to the code needed to draw
an antialiased spline or implementing DOM events (part of which I use as
a hiring interview question due to its complexity).
I remember in the initial releases of gecko we got a lot of support
questions from people wondering why their DOM-using code didn't work in
Netscape when it worked in IE. The reason was that IE didn't create DOM
nodes for whitespace-only nodes and so the DOM was significantly
different and harder to figure out where your nodes lived.
getElementById helped to some extent here, and I think that recent
development of javascript libraries has helped a lot too. However if we
are arguing that people should use those solutions there really is no
need for the ElementTraversal spec at all.
So I honestly can't understand the complexity argument at all. I think
ElementTraversal is something that users really want and would be
trivial to implement with or without .childElements. So there really is
no need to cut corners and good arguments not to.
/ Jonas
