On Mar 22, 2006, at 5:43 AM, Jim Ley wrote:

1) I think it's really useful to have these names be short. The fact that one of the most common operations you do by the dom is called document.getElementById is a huge disaster. We can afford some imprecision in the name in exchange for brevity if this is to be a common idiom.

2) I don't think trying to match a regular expression against the DOM is very sensible. But if you did want to do it, you could convert the DOM to a string. It's not unprecedented for operations with the same name to do different things based on the type. Consider the difference between 2 + 2 and "a" + "a" in ECMAScript. Or consider Array.indexOf vs. String.indexOf. Therefore I am not convinced by your argument that this similarity is problematic.

Use case for matching one is to be able to easily operate on the first item when you know you have a unique match:

document.match("#header").addEventListener("click", headerClick, false);

Also, it is likely this can be done more efficiently than computing the whole static list and then getting the first item. I am sure there are other cases where a unique match is expected, such as looking for a specific attribute value:

document.match("iframe[name='ad-banner']").addEventListener("click", bannerClick, false);

I don't think the case of "first n for some arbitrary value of n" is common enough to be worth adding API for.

Unfortunately the name document.selectNodes is taken by XPath, and select() would be easily confused with document.selection.

Regards, Maciej