Any JavaScript developer who spends more than a blink of an eye working with the DOM has probably come despise the API. It’s not that there’s a dearth of features (welll….); I think it’s the verbosity that causes modern application development woes. For the one-off script that adds an onclick or modifies some text the DOM API is fine and dandy. Try scaling up to developing an application or, perhaps, a framework and things get annoying and messy right quick.
When Tommy finally gave jQuery a try and discovered there was no native DOM manipulation tools he decided to roll his own plug-in he calls FluentDom. The code is clean and quality, as I’d expect from him, but the interface drives me bonkers.
I’m a fan of configuration over convention, a concept which, when combined with my MooTools history, has lead me to favor using object literals as configuration “objects”. When I use MooTools to create a new element the only arguments are the element type and an object literal with any configuration options. This is where Tommy’s code style differs. In FluentDom you set a specific attribute with specific methods with calls able to be chained together. This isn’t to say that FluentDom couldn’t be used with a configuration object, it’s just not as clean an implementation as I prefer.
In a message to him I said this:
The benefit to setting attributes via an object literal is that I can use one set of preset attribute values and pass that around. Quite handy if you’re doing something like iterating and creating a list of similar elements but particular ones might have subtle differences. Also easier to maintain and extend. Given your code it’d be a trivial modification to do this during a create call.
Which do readers prefer, specific, chainable method calls or ambiguous configuration object?