[whatwg] getElementsByClassName()

[Michel Fortin]

Le 2006-02-03 à 11:37, Jim Ley a écrit :

> On 2/3/06, Michel Fortin <michel.fortin at michelf.com> wrote:
>> Le 2006-02-03 à 09:30, Jim Ley a écrit :
>> So to generalize the use case, when I want to attach an event to a
>> child element or an element linked by any other mean to the element
>> having that class, I can't use addEventListenerToClass.
>
> So this shows that addEventListenerToCSSSelector is really what you
> want so you can attach it to A's that are children of the class
> doesn't it?

Not in the case of my last mail: 'A' elements can be everywhere on  
the page (in this specific example, they are in some sort of table of  
contents at the top).

I would still need getElementsByClassNames to first get the div  
elements. Then, for each of these div elements I'd have to use  
addEventListenerToCSSSelector with rule "a[href='#{div id}']", where  
{div id} is replaced by the id attribute of the div. If I really  
wanted to, I could have been listening for new DOM elements of class  
"pane" and, for each of them, add an event handler to the  
corresponding A elements.

Anyway, I just wanted to show one valid use for a  
getElementsByClassNames function and (maybe) for more advanced  
functions (like those with CSS selectors). All these functions would  
accomplish however can already be achieved by looping over the  
elements, so it's not like they are absolutely necessary. And you  
would need something a lot more powerful to handle my complex case  
with only one function call (maybe addEventListenerToXPath?) which  
I'm not asking for because it's probably overkill almost all of the  
time. Obviously a line has to be drawn somewhere.


Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://www.michelf.com/