Henri Sivonen wrote:
On Apr 2, 2008, at 12:44, Jonas Sicking wrote:
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.
It seems to me that allowing indexed access to children creates a
similar kind of problem that allowing indexed access to strings by
UTF-16 code unit has created. Allowing app code to index into platform
structures that are most commonly forward-iterated seems like an
anti-pattern in terms of what implementation constraints are placed if
the impression that the app developer gets is that indexing has the
performance properties of array access and that it is OK to write app
code with that assumption.
What makes you think that most users of the DOM-tree does
forward-iteration? This is not my experience with the code I've seen.
Rather it has been trying to get to specific nodes within a tree.
The same argument can be made for .nextElementSibling, why give
forward-iterating access into platform structures that are most commonly
index-accessed?
/ Jonas
