[whatwg] Proposal for window.DocumentType.prototype.toString

[Johan Sundström]

Hi everybody!

Serializing a complete HTML document DOM to a string is surprisingly
hard in javascript. As a fairly seasoned javascript hacker I figured
this might do it:

  document.doctype + document.documentElement.outerHTML

It doesn't. No browser has a useful window.DocumentType.prototype that
returns either the original document's <!DOCTYPE ...> before parsing –
or a semantically equivalent post-parsing one. Google Chrome shows one
in its devtools, but seems not to export some way of getting at it to
programmers.

My proposal is we specify this more useful behaviour for
javascript-running browsers, so it does become as simple as above. A
rough sketch of how a polyfill might implement the latter
window.DocumentType.prototype.toString:

  https://gist.github.com/3977584

Even as a polyfill, the above is rather limited, though:  I believe
only Firefox implements "internalSubset" today, and probably only in
XML contexts. The most useful implementation would IMO be a native one
that reproducing the doctype, as it was formatted in the source
document.

Thoughts?

-- 
 / Johan Sundström, http://ecmanaut.blogspot.com/