> Clearly your opinions differ from the majority of the web community.
> Why do you think we now have document.querySelectorAll?
This is called "argumentum ad populum" (appeal to popularity). The advent of jQuery caused clueless "developers" (along with library authors) to beg for "native" selectors. QS(A) is the result. They were never needed in the first place.
> Why? ie5.5 is 12 years old.
Internet Explorer's Quirks Mode (which still exists in IE 9) is a simulation of IE 5. It's useful for testing against IE's old box model.
Right and you have to test at least one browser that ranks below your expectations, else you wouldn't know if your feature detection/testing was working.
Granted, the typical Web developer will simply announce they don't care about any browsers deemed inferior (or unknown to them) at the time. History has shown that such carelessness leads to sites that are more likely to break in future (unknown to them at the time of development) browsers.
Often the expected outcome for IE 5 is a static page.
Clearly your opinions differ from the majority of the web community.
Why do you think we now have document.querySelectorAll?
Have a look at the mdn article: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/DOM/Document.querySelectorA...
example given on that page: var matches = document.querySelectorAll("div.note, div.alert");
also :
http://www.w3.org/TR/selectors-api/
Makes perfect sense.
That's what recursion/tree traversal algorithms are for
No. That's what highly optimized browser internals are for.
I test all the way back to IE 5.5
Why? ie5.5 is 12 years old.