XML News from Wednesday, March 12, 2008

The W3C Web API Working Group has published the last call working draft of ElementTraversal Specification. "This specification defines the ElementTraversal interface, which allows script navigation of the elements of a DOM tree, excluding all other nodes in the DOM, such as text nodes. It also provides a property to expose the number of child elements of an element. It is intended to provide a more convenient alternative to existing DOM navigation interfaces, with a low implementation footprint." Hmm, just what the DOM needs: yet another way to do it.

ElementTraversal provides some extra properties/methods for navigating only through elements, while ignoring text and white space:

This makes it easier to process record-like XML, but inappropriate for reading documents with mixed content.