ayg wrote:

Have you tested that this causes no regressions in any browsers (e.g., sortable tables still work)?

I have created testcases here: http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:TheDJ/monobook.js

Which i tested with this page: http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transwiki:Wikiversity-School_of_Computer_Science/IntroProgramingJava

Safari 2, 3, Opera 9.5, FF 2 and FF 3, all returned identical numbers. IE is not tested, but i assume it understands typeof.

Tested and works on IE6

ayg wrote:

Committed in r44774 with whitespace tweaks.

Sorry, but this change
http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/phase3/skins/common/wikibits.js?r1=44192&r2=44774
breaks the interface of function getElementsByClassName. In the original implementation, oClassNames could be a regular expression such as 'wp\\S*', or a list of strings! In the native implementation in Firefox 3, the parameter can only be a single string, see
https://developer.mozilla.org/En/DOM/document.getElementsByClassName
As a result, a call like

getElementsByClassName (elem, '*', 'wp\\S*');

now returns an empty array, whereas it previously returned all child elements of elem having a class that started with "wp". This change breaks some functionality in the upload form on the Commons.

Calls like

getElementsByClassName (elem, '*', ['class1', 'class2']);

also won't work anymore.

Hmm, I totally missed that in the original code.
Well, the original author did write a new version of this class back in May. http://www.robertnyman.com/2008/05/27/the-ultimate-getelementsbyclassname-anno-2008/

However, i'm not that big a fan. It seems like a gigantic amount of code to saddle upon all our clients, for just the smallest amount of usecases.

Another inconsistency: The original implementation returns an array. The native implementation returns a live NodeList. The wrapper function returns that as-is if strTagName is the wildcard, but converts it to an array if strTagName is a specific tag name. That can be really confusing.

This should all be moot once we have jQuery on every page and people can just use $('.classname')

mike.lifeguard+bugs wrote:

(In reply to comment #8)

This should all be moot once we have jQuery on every page and people can just
use $('.classname')

How is anyone supposed to know to do that without some documentation?

(In reply to comment #9)

(In reply to comment #8)

This should all be moot once we have jQuery on every page and people can just
use $('.classname')

How is anyone supposed to know to do that without some documentation?

We could change getElementsByClassName() to wrap around $('.classname') somehow and deprecate the former.

Robert Nyman has released a new version at http://robertnyman.com/2008/05/27/the-ultimate-getelementsbyclassname-anno-2008/ that fixes the NodeList vs. Array issue. However,

• (elm, tag, className) is reversed to (className, tag, elm),
• calls like getElementsByClassName (elm, '*', 'wp\\S*') don't work and can't work with the native API,
• calls like getElementsByClassName (elm, '*', ['class1', 'class2']) don't work, but className can be "class1 class2", as in the native API,
• tag = "*" is broken in browsers with a native implementation (http://robertnyman.com/2008/05/27/the-ultimate-getelementsbyclassname-anno-2008/#comment-430876),
• IE 5.0 is broken (http://robertnyman.com/2008/05/27/the-ultimate-getelementsbyclassname-anno-2008/#comment-289524).

Closing; jQuery is available on every page and wikibits.js will eventually be dropped.