Anne van Kesteren wrote:
I have been told that the reason for not having live collections is
for performance, but I find that hard to understand. The current live
collections are much faster than their native javascript emulations, I
can't see that getting a collection every time it is required will be
faster than getting it once and using it many times.
This is in fact the reason they are static. Browser implementors
indicated that doing this live would not perform well due to the
relative complexity of Selectors.
Just as a point of record, I believe browser implementors were split on
the issue (e.g. I think in Gecko live performance would be as good, if
not better in many cases, as non-live performance. I said so at the
time as well).
The argument that seemed to carry the day at the time is that live
nodelists in general are an "anti-pattern" that shouldn't be foisted on
authors.
-Boris
