On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 3:04 AM, Tim Starling <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
CSS selectors are the worst part of jQuery, I wish
they weren't in it.
Sizzle is slow and bulky -- necessarily so considering what it does,
but a more sensible function-based API could have exposed a rich
feature set to users without introducing nearly so much overhead.
In recent browsers (including IE8), you should be able to implement
selectors very efficiently with querySelector() and
querySelectorAll(). I should hope jQuery does this.
PHP already provides XPath, which is integrated with
the DOM extension
and is just as feature-rich as CSS. We use it in the ImageMap
extension. So if you wanted an insecure text protocol for DOM node
selection, you could just use that.
Pretty much every web developer already knows selectors, though, while
almost nobody uses XPath.