>>If you want elegance, simplicity, and specificity then your best bet is
XPath.
If Diego Perini is listening in to this conversation I'd love to hear his
thoughts, I know this is his area of expertise, and I know he's
very opinionated about where the DOM is headed. I'm not entirely sure I
understand you Austin, are you saying utilize native XPath methods over
traditional DOM methods, because that debate ended a couple of years ago, or
are you saying I should use XPath completely, as what is exposed to the end
user? If the latter, than your idea is intriguing, and not one I would have
considered.

On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 12:46 PM, Cheney, Austin <
[email protected]> wrote:

> > So this presents an interesting dilemma
>
> The dilemma is far more complicated than merely that.  You are using one
> means of selection in a context for which it was never intended.  That is
> why it is incomplete and error prone and it's not because of
> short-sightedness in CSS.  This is why jQuery has to temper its use of CSS
> selectors as a query means with the addition of a large number of methods to
> complement the short comings of this convention.
>
> If you want elegance, simplicity, and specificity then your best bet is
> XPath.  This is the only thing XPath was designed for.  A simple XPath
> expression can give you a higher degree of specificity than a complex CSS
> selection with a whole host of unnecessary methods.  If that option is
> either unavailable or undesirable you can use the clunky DOM methods, which
> are neither the most elegant nor fastest solution, as they do their job with
> clarity.
>
> If at the end of the day you still want to use some out of context
> convention then be prepared to make some hard decisions that come with
> unpleasantly burdensome consequences that extend beyond implementation
> questions.
>
> Thanks,
> Austin Cheney, CISSP
>
> From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On
> Behalf Of Nathan Sweet
> Sent: Tuesday, September 06, 2011 2:12 PM
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: [JSMentors] spaces in attribute values
>
> >>As for ANY CSS property value, that is more than one word you should use
> quotes, like font names. That this would apply to selectors too.
>
> Thanks Poetro,
> So this presents an interesting dilemma, it really is more of a code design
> question whether I should go above and beyond the call of duty and except
> identifiers with white space in them, it would actually be easier for me to
> do so, but would this be lazy? I think I'm good for now, but if anybody is
> really passionate about the philosophy of arbitrarily implementing the CSS
> spec as a mode of selecting elements in javascript, I'd be interested to
> hear their thoughts.
> -Nate
> On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 9:08 AM, Poetro <[email protected]> wrote:
> Sorry, messed the the order
>
> >> Attribute values must be CSS identifiers or strings.
> >
> > See the specification for identifiers
> > http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/syndata.html#value-def-identifier
> >
> >> In CSS, identifiers (including element names, classes, and IDs in
> selectors)
> >> can contain only the characters [a-zA-Z0-9] and ISO 10646 characters
> U+00A0
> >> and higher, plus the hyphen (-) and the underscore (_); they cannot
> start with a
> >> digit, two hyphens, or a hyphen followed by a digit.
> --
> Poetro
>
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