Element Traversal Specification

Members of the W3C Web API WG have issued a Last Call Working Draft of
the "Element Traversal Specification" as part of the Rich Web Clients
Activity. The ElementTraversal interface was originally published as
part of the SVG Tiny 1.2 specification in the SVG namespace. At the
request of the SVG, CDF, JCP, and other groups, it was transferred to
the WebAPI WG, and migrated to DOM and DOM namespace as a generic
facility. The 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 an
attribute 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. The DOM Level
1 Node interface defines 11 node types, but most commonly authors wish
to operate solely on nodeType 1, the Element node. Other node types
include the Document element and Text nodes, which include whitespace
and line breaks. DOM 1 node traversal includes all of these node types,
which is often a source of confusion for authors and which requires an
extra step for authors to confirm that the expected Element node interfaces
are available. This introduces an additional performance constraint. Thus,
ElementTraversal is an interface which allows the author to restrict
navigation to Element nodes. It permits navigation from an element to its
first element child, its last element child, and to its next or previous
element siblings. Because the implementation exposes only the element
nodes, the memory and computational footprint of the DOM representation
can be optimized for constrained devices. The DOM Level 1 Node interface
also defines the childNodes attribute, which is a live list of all child
nodes of the node; the childNodes list has a length attribute to expose
the total number of child nodes of all nodeTypes, useful for preprocessing
operations and calculations before, or instead of, looping through the
child nodes. The ElementTraversal interface has a similar attribute,
childElementCount, that reports only the number of Element nodes, which
is often what is desired for such operations.