Hello everyone,
I've noticed that the find/findAll methods are currently being discussed and
there is one thing that might be a good idea to consider.
Currently, it's quite uncomfortable to use XPath in javascript. The
document.evalute method has lots of arguments and we have to remember plenty of
constants to make it work. IE and Opera support selectNodes method on
NodePrototype, which is really useful, but what's the point in using it when it
doesn't work in FF/Chrome/Safari.
My idea is to combine querySelector/All and selectNodes methods. This
combination - find/findAll - would make using XPath much easier and it might
give a good reason to lot's of programmers to use it instead of
querySelector/All although it's going to be newer technology.
The problem is how to combine the methods, because in some cases it might not
be clear if the string is xpath or css query. Because CSS queries are probably
going to be used much more often than xpath it should be easier to call the
method with CSS query. There is an idea I have but I would be glad for any
other.
findAll(query, use_xpath):
CSS: findAll("nav a:first-child");
XPATH: findAll("//nav/a[1]", true);
Cheers,
Martin Kadlec
