Jean-Yves Bitterlich wrote:
A few alternatives were proposed here, referred below as
(i) 'attribute NodeList childElements',
(ii) 'Node item(index)' and
(iii) xpath .querySelector.
I personally like (iii) because it is powerful (or is it just queries
that are powerful?), however it definitely belongs to another spec.
Alternative (i) has its advantages and disadvantages that were also
theoretically mentioned in this thread. However, from our experience in
the mobile space and in particular given our implementations (optimized
SVG and 280-DOM, both for Java-ME), it would cost extra memory and code
execution: the implementation would need to create an object with very
short life span (an instance of NodeList). It should hurt the
performance on two fronts: extra garbage collection and extra code
execution. On the other hand, if Elements would cache the NodeList
object it will inevitably affect RAM footprint.
Do you have any data on how much extra this footprint would be? It seems
to me that it usually should be very small compared to the other things
stored in a DOM, such as attribute values and text nodes, not to mention
all rendering objects needed to display a web page.
/ Jonas
