Yehuda Katz is a member of the Ruby on Rails core team, and lead developer of the Merb project. He is a member of the jQuery Core Team, and a core contributor to DataMapper. He contributes to many open source projects, like Rubinius and Johnson, and works on some he created himself, like Thor.
@julio_ody You should :) It's a whole new world of awesomeness, promise...
IE8 is Gonna Rock
March 21st, 2008
So maybe my title was a bit overdramatic. But in the announcement of IE8’s features, one jumped out at me as a potentially game-changing feature.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/readiness/DevelopersNew.htm#dom
Yes.
That’s right.
“Selectors are a query language for searching and “selecting” tags (elements) within a webpage. They are most commonly seen in CSS to “select” a group of elements to which certain properties will be applied:
Selector{
property: value;
property2: value;
}
In Internet Explorer 7 there is no way of “executing” the selector independently of CSS. Internet Explorer 8’s implementation of the Selectors API is based on the W3C Working Draft: http://www.w3.org/TR/selectors-api/”
Yes. You read that correctly. To the extent of IE8’s support for CSS2.1 (which should be relatively complete, according to their announcement), it will be possible to use the standards-compliant querySelector and querySelectorAll in IE to get collections of elements at native speed. This means fast class-name lookup, fast attribute lookup, and much much more.
Here’s a lame example of its use from an IE8 whitepaper:
function doValidation () {
// Retrieve the required elements by using Selectors
// Selects all the form fields with 'required' classes
var reqs = document.querySelectorAll(".required");
// Set the flag to false by default
var missingRequiredField = false;
// Validate that the form data is not empty
for (var i = 0; i < reqs.length; i++) {
if (reqs[i].value == "")
missingRequiredField = true;
}
Yep. It is what it looks like. Finally, the days of slow IE selectors may be coming to an end. And finally, one where MS is ahead of the curve (in fact, a lot of the IE8 improvements are pretty neat and forward-looking; I recommend taking a look at it)
Kamal Gill, Posted March 21, 2008, 1:17 pm
Safari 3.1, released 18 March 2008, natively supports querySelector and querySelectorAll (and, btw, getElementsByClassName).
I suspect Firefox 3 and the next Opera release will also support the querySelector* API.
Selectors API spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/selectors-api/
whoismario, Posted March 23, 2008, 8:12 pm
Do you know if Apple plans on allowing a focus event on a div in Safari? I have some behavior I’d like to attach to a div via a selector, but without the focus event most of it is useless in Safari and Opera.
Vitaly Sharovatov, Posted April 11, 2008, 7:17 am
Yes, IEb1 supports Selectors API, but:
1) as IE doesn’t have proper namespace support, we can’t use Selectors API to query for elements in a different namespace
2) as the techspec doesn’t offer any solution for the potential history theft possibility, IE8b1 ignores :link and :visited pseudoclasses to prevent history theft
I’ve blogged about that here.
Regarding WebKit support for Selectors API: on my Windows machine latest build of Webkit (r31786) is much slower in querying using Selectors API then IE8b1. I used this test and will post results a little bit later.
And I didn’t notice any support for Selectors API neither in Firefox 3.04b nor in Opera 9.50 beta.
Vitaly