document.body.childNodes

should be:

   document.getElementsByTagName(’*')

by cut & paste I took it from the wrong example, but it works, have a look in my site I am updating it.

Diego

The first query will fill the cache, from there on queries will be immediate.-

The full example is at: my demo place if you want to see the timings.

Hope the cut & paste works, enjoy and comment please.

Here goes the snippet:

/*
* ElementsById
*
* Author: Diego Perini
* Updated: 06/11/2006
* Version: 0.0 (from parent)
*
* Extracted from latest versions of IPORT/STYLER engines.
*
* Returns an array of elements with specified ID.
*/
function ElementsById($id) {
var c=0,i=0,j=0,k=0;
var nodes=[],storage=arguments.callee.storage;
var childrens=document.body.childNodes,len=childrens.length;

// only BODY elements are checked, no HTML or HEAD nodes/subnodes
if (storage && storage.length && storage.length != 0) {
k = $id;
while (storage[k]) {
nodes[nodes.length] = storage[k];
k = $id + ‘_’ + (++i);
}
} else {
storage = { length: 0 };
while (len > i) {
c = childrens[i];
if ((k = c.id) == $id) {
nodes[nodes.length] = c;
if(storage[k]) {
k = c.id + ‘_’ + (++j);
}
}
i++;
storage[k] = c;
storage.length++;
}
arguments.callee.storage = storage;
}
return nodes;
}

My problem was that I had to resize almost all the rows of a table dynamically (it doesn’t matter why, we needed this). The strategy was to iterate through all the rows setting the heights to the apropiate values.

This thing takes a *lot* of time. About 70 ms for a 600 rows table (= 42 seconds).

After some fight with it, I managed to solve it hidding (style.display=’none’) the div containing the table before doing the resizing and showing it again afterwards (style.display=’inline’). This only little thing made the time drop to 2 ms per row (about 1.2 seconds). As you can see, a big improvement!

Aparently, Internet Explorer defers the DOM drawing/update until it is shown.

I hope this helps somebody!

Your ids are all still unique and you get the performance boost of getElementById().

I think the need for speed and appropriate collections to apply behaviors to is worthy, but this is surely not a reasonable way to accomplish it.

<B ID="example" NAME="example">Example 1</B>
<B ID="example" NAME="example">Example 2</B>
<SCRIPT>
document.write(document.getElementsByName("example").length)
</SCRIPT>

Example 1

Example 2

document.write(document.getElementsByName(”example”).length)

Pavan Keely

The problem of not showing up Divs in Firefox is because I am using innerText which is not supported in Firefox, in place of that if you try using document.createTextNode, it displays the Divs and Firefox does support appendChild on document.body. But I have to agree with you that Forefox is not supporting Firefox. I think I somehow missed it because my plan was to test in 3 diff browsers.

Pavan Keely

Meanwhile why do people feel the need to become so outraged? Alex put up the disclaimer that this was not a standards friendly manouver and even called it a ‘hack’.

On the upside flaming does prompt some very informative justification posts. From Alex at least.

That’s a great result! It works on nightly Safaris and Konq 3.5.1 as well.

Outstanding.