Comments on: E4X: I want my S-expressions back

by: tonyg

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 10:42:39 +0000

Second embarrassing update: If I'd used an XMLList instead of an array, my buildItems() would have worked just as I intended:

function buildItems() {
  return <><item>Hello</item>
           <item>World!</item></>;
}
var doc = <mydocument>{buildItems()}</mydocument>;

by: tonyg

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 10:21:57 +0000

As it happens, I was wrong about the lack of computed tags:

js> var y = 'sometag';
js> (<{y}/>).toXMLString();
<sometag/>

by: Chris Double

Mon, 26 Jun 2006 10:18:51 +0000

Nice! I look forward to seeing what you’ve done :)

by: tonyg

Mon, 26 Jun 2006 09:08:47 +0000

Thanks for the link, Chris - something similar had occurred to me, too (both the SXML and Seaside HTML canvas approaches should translate to Javascript pretty well), but I haven't had a chance to explore the design space properly yet.

As it happens, I got into experimenting with E4X through hacking a Seaside-a-like onto your server-side javascript implementation. I'll post about that soon :-)

by: Chris Double

Sat, 24 Jun 2006 23:18:10 +0000

It's also frustrating that you can't take an E4X node and insert it directly into the browser DOM.

There is no 'toHTML' which prevents the use of E4X for dynamically generating valid HTML - you have to stick with XHTML. Unfortunately some browsers require things like 'SCRIPT' tags to have a closing tag rather than the shortcut method. ie. They need not . E4X is incapable of handling this and is non extensible for generating your own output methods.

As an s-expression style approach I tend to use code like this:

http://mg.to/2006/02/27/easy-dom-creation-for-jquery-and-prototype

Chris.