[webkit-dev] Why so many text nodes in the DOM? (especially ones with just whitespace)

[David Hyatt]

On Jun 17, 2010, at 4:24 PM, Matt 'Murph' Finnicum wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 4:19 PM, David Hyatt <hyatt at apple.com> wrote:
> On Jun 17, 2010, at 2:45 PM, Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri wrote:
> 
> > David, it's bit more than annoying, it's fragmenting memory for no
> > good. In the long run on systems will small memory it does make a
> > difference :-/
> >
> > I'd like to see some option, maybe compile-time, to strip these
> > useless whitespaces.
> >
> 
> As Alexey points out, this is a compatibility issue though.  People write code assuming the whitespace nodes are there.  If you remove them, you'll see Web site breakage.
> 
> dave
> (hyatt at apple.com)
> 
> 
> Do people write code assuming the content of the whitespace nodes? That seems very unlikely to me. If not, we could collapse them and be much more efficient about things (such as a simple flag in their parent node that represents their existence)
> 

They absolutely do.  Way back in the original KHTML, these nodes were omitted from the DOM, and we had compatibility bugs in WebCore caused by the absence of those nodes.  One of the earliest bits of work I did on WebCore (8 yrs ago) was to add those whitespace nodes back into the DOM.

The other issue you run into is that at any time someone can change the style of an element to have white-space: pre in CSS.  If you don't retain information about the white-space, then you'll have a correctness issue when the white-space style changes and suddenly requires you to preserve the spaces.

dave
(hyatt at apple.com)

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