dom-movement

This library provides a simple means to move from position to position in a DOM tree. It works with XML and HTML DOM trees.

General Principles

Relevance

The primary goal of this library is to model movements among the characters of a document that are visible to the end user. What this means in practice varies from use-case scenario to use-case scenario. For instance, in some cases, element attributes may correspond to text visible to the user, and in many other cases it won't.

This library's implementation aims to strike a balance between an extremely general implementation that would allow movement suitable for all usage scenarios, but which would increase code complexity and development time (and probably run into YAGNI), and too specialized an implementation that ends up not being useful except in a few specialized cases.

This library is able to move through:

• text nodes,
• elements,
• documents,
• document fragments.

The other types of DOM elements are deemed "irrelevant" and skipped.

You can add to the list of irrelevant nodes (by using the relevanceTest parameter of DOMSpace's constructor). For instance, you could decide that all nodes that are invisible due to their CSS style are irrelevant, and they would also be skipped. However, you cannot remove from the list shown above. The library provides no sanctioned way, for instance, to deem attribute notes relevant and move through them.

Intrinsic Node Relevance

Intrinsic relevance is determined by two tests that the node must pass:

• An internal test performed by the DOMSpace implementation. This test only deems elements, text nodes, document nodes and document fragments as intrinsicly relevant.

• If the internal test is successfull (i.e. the node was deemed intrinsically relevant), then the relevanceTest provided to the constructor, if provided, is used.

The internal test cannot be overruled by relevanceTest. You could overrule it by overriding it in a derived class but doing so is not supported. You would have to override other methods of DOMSpace in order to prevent it from crashing.

Notation

In the following examples, we will use the notation <tag_i> indicate that the element tag is intrinsically irrelevant. The absence of _i means that the element is contextually relevant. Note that the suffix merely indicates irrelevance and is not actually part of the element name.

Contextual Node Relevance

A node is contextually relevant if the node and all its ancestor nodes within the space are intrinsically relevant. Consider this tree:

<div_i>
 <p>Foo</p>
</div_i>

In this example the div element is intrinsically irrelevant. The element p is deemed intrinsically relevant. However, it would still would be contextually irrelevant because its parent is intrinsically irerelevant.

Location Relevance

Similarly, locations are relevant or irrelevant. (There is no distinction between intrinsic and contextual irrelevance for locations.) A relevant location is a location into a contextually relevant node. An irrelevant location is a location into a contextually irrelevant node. Note that a relevant location can point to an irrelevant node.

Consider this tree:

<div>
 <p_i>Foo</p_i>
</div>

The location (p, 0) points to the text node inside the paragraph. Since the paragraph is intrinsically irrelevant, the text node in it is contextually irrelevant, and the location is irrelevant too.

The location (div, 1) points to the element p in div. (The offset is 1, because at offset 0 there is a text node containing whitespace.) Although this location points to an intrinsically irrelevant node, the location itself is relevant because it is a location div, which is contextually relevant.

Reversibility

Suppose two locations A and B in a DOMSpace. When iterating over the positions from A to B, you get intermediary positions P1, P2, P3. If you iterate from B to A then the intermediary positions will be P3, P2, P1.