Hi, Henri-
Henri Sivonen wrote (on 4/1/08 10:36 AM):
c. just remove the childElementCount attribute
It seems to me that checking if an element has *any* element children is
going to be the most common use case for childElementCount and that can
be checked by checking if firstElementChild is null.
I very much like the idea having firstElementChild, lastElementChild,
previousElementSibling, nextElementSibling. In particular, I think using
var e = p.firstElementChild;
while (e != null) {
...
e = e.nextElementChild
}
to iterate over child elements is a cleaner idiom than introducing an
index that isn't used for random access but only for forward iteration.
How often do people pick a single child by index (with a number know a
priori) instead of iterating over children and testing each one for an
interesting trait?
Again, childElementCount is not intended for index access. It's
intended as a preprocessing convenience for script authors. This saves
the costly DOM operation of having to process the loop twice in script,
once to count the elements, and another to set values based on the total
number of elements.
As an SVG author, this is something I've needed many times.
Regards-
-Doug Schepers
W3C Team Contact, SVG, CDF, and WebAPI
