On Jan 27, 2007, at 5:36 PM, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
"they give no idea what they will do, are more likely to conflict
with function
names in existing code that do other things, and if you want to
shorten things
document.foo() is already a pain and you would write a wrapper even
for that,
called get() or something".
OK, so I'm going to assume the following pairs were ruled out for
because it seemed unclear what they will do and because they are more
likely to conflict:
match()/matchAll()
get()/getAll()
The following was considered clear, but the two names too confusably
similar:
getElementBySelector()/getElementsBySelector()
Thus, the following was the winner:
getElementBySelector()/getElementListBySelector()
How about the following (suggested in various places on the thread):
cssQuery()/cssQueryAll()
bySelector()/bySelectorAll()
bySelector()/listBySelector()
getBySelector()/getBySelectorAll()
Note that CSS selectors today cannot address non-element nodes,
however, this may not be the case for all time. If they ever become
able to address text nodes directly, it will actually be better not
to have "Element" in the name.
Here are other brief names that make the connection to Selectors (AKA
CSS Selectors) clear in varying degrees:
queryCSS()
matchCSS()
cssMatch()
matchSelector()
matchSel()
bySel()
querySel()
querySelector()
(Various forms of long names left as an excercise to the reader).
Please consider both of these sets of names to be my constructive
alternate proposals, as requested. I think all of them satisfy the
requirement that it is clear what they do (look things up by
selector), are unlikely to conflict with names in existing code(*)
Note that cssQuery in particular was proposed by Björn, a member of
the Working Group, so I hope it was considered during the discussion.
Perhaps it was rejected, but the reason is not mentioned in the
minutes or your note.
Regards,
Maciej
* - This seems unlikely in any case since they are Document methods;
and surely things like getAttribute and setAttribute exist in non-DOM
code, but thanks to the magic of object oriented programming and the
fact that such names are class-scoped this is not a big problem.
