Oh, right. Trying to be smart and it just proved otherwise. :P
> I don't really see a good reason to complicate the algorithm for this
> scenario, personally.
This edge case may seem absurd at first sight. Let me provide a use case:
Imagine you have this simple site
```
<ul>
<li><a href=“blog.html”>Blog</li>
<li><a href=“blog.html”>About</li>
<li><a href=“blog.html”>Contact</li>
</ul>
<main>About page content</main>
```
You are currently at the about page. What you are trying to do is that when the
user clicks a nav link, the corresponding page is fetched via ajax, and
inserted before or after the current main element, depending on whether the
clicked nav link exists before or after the current nav link.
So when the page is first loaded, you first loop over the nav links to create
empty mains for placeholder purposes.
```
<ul>
<li><a href=“blog.html”>Blog</li>
<li><a href=“about.html”>About</li>
<li><a href=“contact.html”>Contact</li>
</ul>
<main></main>
<main>About page content</main>
<main></main>
```
How do you do that? Well, ideally, you should be able to just do (in pseudo
code):
```
currentMain = get the main element
links = get all a elements
mains = []
for i, link in links
if link is current link
mains[i] = currentMain
else
mains[i] = clone currentMain shallowly
currentMain.replaceWith(…mains)
```
This way you are inserting nodes in batch, and not having to deal with choosing
insertBefore or appendChild.
Without `replaceWith` supporting it, in order to do batch insertions (nav links
could be a large list, imagining a very long TOC links), you are forced to
manually do the steps I mentioned in the first mail.
> On Jan 16, 2015, at 4:22 PM, Anne van Kesteren <ann...@annevk.nl> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 8:47 AM, Glen Huang <curvedm...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Another way to do this is that in mutation method macro, prevent `oldNode`
>> from being added to the doc frag, and after that, insert the doc frag before
>> `oldNode`, finally remove `oldNode`. No recursive finding of next sibling is
>> needed this way.
>
> But then d2 would no longer be present?
>
> I don't really see a good reason to complicate the algorithm for this
> scenario, personally.
>
>
> --
> https://annevankesteren.nl/
