On 10/5/11 4:14 AM, Marcos Caceres wrote:
1. I need to find elements of a particular type/name that are in a particular language (in tree order), so that I can extract that information to display to a user.
This use case is handled by querySelectorAll and :lang, no?
2. I need to check what the language of an element is (if any), without walking up the tree to look for an xml:lang attribute. Walking the tree is expensive, specially when XML says that xml:lang value is inherited by default.
So what you really want is for the UA to do the tree-walk for you instead? I doubt any UA is going to burn memory on storing the language on every element just so they can quickly answer the rare question posed above...
Now a tree-walk in the UA code may be faster than doing it from JS. But it'll still be a treewalk.
A better reason for doing this would be that there are sources of language information that are not xml:lang. Or do you explicitly not want to take those into account?
One other question: "expensive" is a relative term. How often do you expect to perform this operation?
-Boris
