hasAttribute deprecated? using querySelector.

[terriko]

I have a Firefox add-on I made several years ago to help me explore page composition and generate (theoretical) web security policies, and I decided to pull it out of storage and see if it could still be helpful. Of course, my browser decided to update Right Then, and I decided it wasn't worth fighting to stop it from doing so.

So I updated the add-on so that it included versions 5.* and actually, it mostly still worked (despite having been written for, I believe, a very early version of Firefox 3, or maybe a late version Firefox 2? This is one of my earliest add-ons.) except that apparently hasAttribute/getAttribute doesn't exist anymore.

I can't seem to find anywhere telling me that they've been deprecated, and more importantly, what I should be using instead, which is irritating. But the end result is that it doesn't work, so I needed to find something else. It looks like the solution for at least some of my code is to instead use a querySelector to look for all elements with that attribute.

Of course, I never seem to want to do exactly what the darned examples show. So in case you're like me, the way to search for any tag with a given attribute using querySelector is like this:

document.querySelectorAll("*[myattribute]");

And if you wanted to search just a specific type of tag, then you'd specify that instead of *. So if you were looking for the alt tags for every image, you'd do...

document.querySelectorAll("img[alt]");

But I'm concerned by this note in the querySelectorAll documentation, which tells me that it "Returns a non-live NodeList of all elements descended from the element on which it is invoked that match the specified group of CSS selectors."

There's a big warning elsewhere that it's non-live too, unlike other such methods. So my questions are... why is it non-live, and what do I need to do to get a live list? For my particular purpose at the moment I don't think I need it to be live, but for some of the older code that I might want to update in the future I probably do.

I'm mostly just recording this for my own reference later, but if someone happens to be able to tell me if there's another function that more directly replaces hasAttribute, or there's a good way to get a live list of elements with a given attribute, I'd love to know!

Comments

non-live

[dnivie.livejournal.com]

I believe the list is non-live only in the sense that the array of matching elements is not automagically updated to include new elements which starts matching the query, or to remove elements that no longer match the query.

The individual elements in the array are live, in the sense that they contain current state, and that changes to them affect the live document.

Atleast that's how I remember it, but take it with a grain of salt, it's been a while since I messed with this stuff.

Re: non-live

[terriko]

If that's the case, it's still better than nothing, but ... still potentially a problem, and it doesn't really answer the question of why or whether there's a way to get a live list.