Chapter 11
DOM Extensions
WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?
- Understanding the Selectors API
- Using HTML5 DOM extensions
- Working with proprietary DOM extensions
Even though the DOM is a fairly well-defined API, it is also frequently augmented with both standards-based and proprietary extensions to provide additional functionality. Prior to 2008, almost all of the DOM extensions found in browsers were proprietary. After that point, the W3C went to work to codify some of the proprietary extensions that had become de facto standards into formal specifications.
The two primary standards specifying DOM extensions are the Selectors API and HTML5. These both arose out of needs in the development community and a desire to standardize certain approaches and APIs. There is also a smaller Element Traversal specification with additional DOM properties. Proprietary extensions still exist, even though these two specifications, especially HTML5, cover a large number of DOM extensions. The proprietary extensions are also covered within this chapter.
SELECTORS API
One of the most popular capabilities of JavaScript libraries is the ability to retrieve a number of DOM elements matching a pattern specified using CSS selectors. Indeed, the library jQuery (www.jquery.com) is built completely around the CSS selector queries of a DOM document in order to retrieve references to elements instead of using getElementById() and getElementsByTagName().
The Selectors API (www.w3.org/TR/selectors-api) was started by the ...
