[webkit-dev] Replacing DOM Mutation Events

[Adam Klein]

Greetings webkit-dev,

It's generally agreed upon in the web community, and in WebKit
specifically, that DOM Mutation Events are a bad thing. See, e.g.,
discussion on https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8191 (relating
to DOMAttrModified, and why WebKit does not wish to implement it) and
https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2010-August/013805.html
(a discussion of replacing DOM mutations with something better, or
removing them entirely).

In late June, Jonas Sicking and Olli Pettay from Mozilla put forward
proposals on public-webapps
(http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webapps/2011AprJun/1318.html)
to replace mutation events with a different API, one that avoids the
problems associated with the existing spec.

Rafael Weinstein has helpfully summarized the public-webapps thread
(which is now upwards of 200 messages long) in
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webapps/2011JulSep/0779.html,
and discussion is ongoing in
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webapps/2011JulSep/0780.html.
Any WebKit folks interested in the future of mutation events in the
DOM are invited to join that discussion, and their input would be much
appreciated.

I've also put together a partial implementation of Jonas' most recent
proposal and uploaded my
work-in-progress patch to
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=66079. Note that this is very
early work, and if I were submitting it for review it would be in much
smaller chunks, but I welcome any comments or questions on the code
as-is.

- Adam