Henri Sivonen wrote:
On Apr 2, 2008, at 00:48, Boris Zbarsky wrote:
OK. So item() would be available on Element after casting it to
NodeList in those implementations. I guess you're saying that the
cast would not longer be unambiguous if there were multiple NodeLists
that might make sense? So childElements couldn't be implemented with
a |return this;|?
That doesn't seem like such a terrible implementation burden to me, to
be honest...
I'm not claiming it would be awfully hard, but it does change the impact
of Element Traversal from adding four or five methods on an existing
class (mere code footprint; super-simple) to adding more run-time object
instances. And then, there are issues like should childElements return
the same object every time. And if yes, then the implementor needs to
add a new pointer to each element node or to add a hashtable on the
owner document or something along those lines. Again, not awfully hard,
but still more complex than just adding convenience methods on an
existing class.
Sure it's more complex, but it's still trivial.
And to what end? To use indexing instead of list-style
iteration.
Exactly. Something that I would imagine is quite commonly done. Note
that we're not just talking iterating over a full DOM tree, we're also
talking about navigating around in a DOM tree from one known specific
node to another.
/ Jonas
