DOM 3 XPath in Web Kit

Last week the WebKit team announced support for DOM Level 3 XPath in the nightly builds.

If you want to play with that, there’s a tutorial on Mozilla’s XPath support, which has live examples that work with WebKit.

Native XPath in the browser means we can ditch the expensive calls to document.getElementsByClassName() in our libraries.

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This entry was written by Bill Humphries and posted on September 4, 2006 at 11:22 pm and filed under programming. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the Atom feed for this post. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.
  • geecu
    I've tested it (FF and Safari on Mac), //div[@class="class"] is about 20 times *slower* than getElementByClassName. Maybe I was doing something wrong... have you tested it?
  • @ jmdesp: no doubt that a native version of getElementBySelector would be fast. It's one of the items the WHAT-WG considering.

    But given the choice between Prototype's getElementsByClassName(), and a native XPath expression, I'll take the later.
  • jmdesp
    I don't understand. Why would byClassName be more expensive to implement than xpath ? Or is it because you can't point to exactly what you want and need expensive enumerations ?
    Whatever getElementById will always be the fastest choice, and it's better to reorganise the page in order to use it.
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