Comments on: A Free JavaScript Speed Boost for Everyone!

By: Henrik Lindqvist

Henrik Lindqvist — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 20:52:03 +0000

Howdays many selector implementations exists and Dean Edwards may not be the best choice regarding speed. Check out our implementaion Selector.js, and Slickspeed benchmarks.

By: MarkAJohnson

MarkAJohnson — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 21:04:59 +0000

This is indeed good news. It’s nice to know about Base2, too–I hadn’t seen that feature.

To answer the question above about “when will it be available everywhere”, well, the answer is basically it is *already* available everywhere, but older browsers will have to download a JS implementation of it, whereas the newer ones do it natively. If you can afford the performance hit (of node selection across the entire document tree in JS) in the older browsers, you’re good.

Pity it’s CSS selectors, though, instead of XPath. You could always implement the CSS selectors on top of an XPath processor–good luck going the other way.

Oh, well.

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 12:04:35 +0000

This is very exciting… I wonder if this will have significant speed advantages over current frameworks with similar selector patterns like jQuery… or perhaps they already use these features when available. Ya, that would make sense.

Either way, CSS selecting in the DOM is very cool.

By: elduderino

elduderino — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 11:04:51 +0000

It’s an exciting development in javascript but how long is it going to be until we can start using this and be sure it’s going to be working for everyone??

By: krdr

krdr — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 08:00:46 +0000

Andrew,
there’s pattern called state machine. Instead of checking: if(document.querySelector)on each function call, all you need is to check once, during initialization:if(document.querySelector) { loadDOMSelectorFunctions(); } else { loadOldSelectorFunctions(); }

By: Andrew Tetlaw

Andrew Tetlaw — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 23:06:16 +0000

I mentioned it above but here it is again: Safari 3.1, Firefox 3.1, and IE8. As far as Opera goes, it doesn’t appear to be in 9.6 but according to this post: http://my.opera.com/core/blog/selectors-api it is being worked on.

By: Integralist

Integralist — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 15:29:56 +0000

Can you confirm which browsers will support the new W3C Selector API?

I assume: Firefox (version?), Opera (version?), Safari (version?), IE8.

I also assume that IE6/7 are off the list.

Ta,