[whatwg] Re: getElementsByClassName

[Jim Ley]

On 9/5/05, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> > That's why I propose to make this function use exactly the syntax that
> > class attribute uses. getElementsByClassName("bar foo") should match
> > class="foo bar", class="bar baz foo", etc.
> 
> I fear that this would be rife with implementation bugs, as opposed to
> requiring the author to pre-split the search input, which guarentees that
> the UA does not have to process the search input in any way, only having
> to deal with the actual class attribute.

Yet it's the exact same processing as the UA's already have for the
class attribute in HTML?  A UA already needs to tokenise a whitespaced
seperated string into classnames, what's different about this
whitespace seperated string?

Jim.