[whatwg] HTMLCollection and HTMLAllCollection suggestion
Perry Smith
pedzsan at gmail.com
Sun Apr 4 07:07:21 PDT 2010
On Apr 3, 2010, at 11:58 PM, David Flanagan wrote:
> Perry Smith wrote:
>> HTMLCollection has a namedItem method that returns either null or
>> one object. [1]
>> HTMLAllCollection has a namedItem method that returns either null,
>> one object, or a collection of objects. [2]
>> I'm a Rails freak and one of the things that they do which I love
>> is foo returns an item and foos returns a list of items. The
>> unconscious benefit of this I believe is huge.
>> My suggestion is to have namedItem always return either null or 1
>> object.
>> And have namedItem*s* always return a collection. We can debate
>> whether it is better to return null or an empty collection. I
>> prefer the latter myself. Then I can always feed it to an iterator.
>> [1] http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/urls.html#htmlcollection-0
>> [2] http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/urls.html#htmlallcollection-0
>
> Perry,
>
> But no one actually invokes namedItem()--they just use a regular
> property access expression on an HTMLAllCollection. namedItem() is
> left over from the strange days when the W3C was specifying Java
> APIs for working with XML instead of JavaScript APIs for HTML!
Hmm. I was wondering. The pop up boxes on the side did not have any
icons in them so I thought no one had implemented them.
Can you give me an example of "regular property access expression on
an HTMLAllCollection" ? I can't figure out what you are referring to.
Thanks,
Perry
More information about the whatwg
mailing list