On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 1:47 PM, Ian Hickson <i...@hixie.ch> wrote: > For HTMLOptionsElement, the situation is more murky. > > http://software.hixie.ch/utilities/js/live-dom-viewer/saved/1739 > > From what I can tell, IE doesn't do direct named access, you have to do it > via item() or namedItem(). The spec didn't support item() access for > names, though all the browsers did. I've filed a bug on DOM Core for that. > Using namedItem(), you see that IE returns a live HTMLCollection, the spec > returns a live NodeList, WebKit returns a static NodeList, and Opera and > Firefox return just the first option. (There's a note in the spec asking > if we should switch to HTMLCollection rather than NodeList.)
I haven't followed the details closely enough to know which APIs should be returning which types of lists/collections. As a general point though, anywhere we can avoid live NodeLists/Collections is a big improvement. They impose a significant implementation cost both in terms of complexity and in terms of performance impact.