> In this particular case, I think anything that's implemented in all of the > major browser engines should be an official standard, not just de facto.
Why only in this particular case? :) As a rule that seems like sound guidance. If it's implemented everywhere, shouldn't you have to make a pretty compelling case for it _not_ to be included in an official standard? On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 1:42 PM, Maciej Stachowiak <m...@apple.com> wrote: > > On Oct 18, 2009, at 4:14 AM, Jonas Sicking wrote: > > On Sun, Oct 18, 2009 at 12:12 AM, Doug Schepers <schep...@w3.org> wrote: > > So, rather than dwell on an admittedly imperfect spec, I personally suggest > > that we urge WebKit developers to implement .children and .children.length, > > in the anticipation that this will be in a future spec but can be useful to > > authors today. > > They already do. Which casts some amount of doubt on Maciejs argument > that it was too performance heavy to implement in WebKit. :) > > What I said way back in the day (about childElements) was this: > > "I suggest leaving this out, because it's not possible to implement > both next/previous and indexed access in a way that is efficient for > all cases (it's possible to make it fast for most cases but pretty > challenging to make it efficient for all). This is especially bad > with a live list and an element whose contents may be changing while > you are iterating. > > If all you care about is looping through once, writing the loop with > nextElementSibling is not significantly harder than indexing a list." > > I stand by that remark. It is indeed hard to get both indexed and > previous/next access efficient in all cases. Of course, we are not going to > let that stop us from interoperating with de facto standards, and we do our > best (as for other kinds of NodeLists and HTMLCollections), but I'd rather > not have new APIs follow this pattern. > In this particular case, I think anything that's implemented in all of the > major browser engines should be an official standard, not just de facto. > Regards, > Maciej >