On Fri, 10 Sep 2010 19:05:56 -0400, Maciej Stachowiak <m...@apple.com>
wrote:
On Sep 10, 2010, at 5:35 AM, Anne van Kesteren wrote:
Hi,
I thought I'd email some people directly to figure out what we can do
with Attr as it is one of the last bits not defined yet in Web DOM Core
and I would sort of like to handle it so the specification is
"complete" (at least beyond the initial 80%).
Attr nodes have traditionally allowed child nodes to account for
EntityReference nodes, a concept which no browser vendor implemented.
While it is great nobody implemented the complexity that is
EntityReference, it has left us with a fair bit complexity for Attr
nodes, which is implemented.
There are several ways we can simplify Attr nodes (some are orthogonal):
1) We can drop the concept of Attr nodes having children. In Gecko it
already depends on how you created the Attr node [1][2] whether it can
have children or not. I think we should either consistently allow
children or not at all (preferred).
2) We can drop the concept of Attr being a Node. This would drastically
reduce the footprint of the object. The difficulty would be in figuring
out what we would need to preserve. Ideally someone implements this in
a nightly and figures it out.
3) We can drop the concept of Attr being an object altogether. I do not
think this is doable compatibility-wise, but not having
Node.attributes, Attr, and just using
getAttribute/getAttributeNS/setAttribute/setAttributeNS would be very
nice complexity-wise.
If there is anything else I have not considered that can we try out
please mention it! Any input on this is much appreciated.
My preference would be to simplify as much as we can get away with
consistent with Web compatibility, all the way up to removing Attr nodes
entirely if we can.
I do not know the Web compat impact of different options though.
<http://site.games.betfair.com/betting/MarketView.do?gsi=1444089> at one
time made use of attr_node.firstChild.nodeValue instead of attr_node.value
and used to break in Opera since Opera didn't support that. Opera was
fixed so that worked (as quite a few users complained about that site).
The site might still require that.
I think it was in
<http://site.games.betfair.com/201007-1008/js/dataObject.js> in
models_Base_Data.prototype.getText where other code was using that
function not just on regular text nodes but Attr text nodes to get the
attribute's value. I'm not sure if the code has changed since I last
checked in Jan or 2008 though.
At the time, I made
<http://shadow2531.com/opera/testcases/attr/suite0.html> to test some
things with Attr nodes. (Note that the description on that page is
outdated.)
--
Michael
