Querying the DOM on the Sly

26 Mar 2009

Remember when we thought there may be less CSS selector engines? Instead we have renewed performance-based competition among them.

Sly is the latest selector engine created by Harald Kirschner.

To use, it looks like this:

JAVASCRIPT:

// Finds all odd rows in all tables
var rows = Sly.search(‘table td:odd’);
// Finds all links with class "internal" and an attribute "href" starting with "#".
var links = Sly.search(‘a.internal[href^="#"]‘);
// Another notation is also possible, since Sly acts as a constructor
var snippets = Sly(‘pre.highlight.javascript> code’).search();
// features is just one element, lists has all list items are siblings of features
var features = Sly.find(‘#features’);
var lists = Sly.search(‘~ ul’, body);

What does it feature?

Pure and powerful JavaScript matching algorithm for fast and accurate queries
Extra optimizations for frequently used selectors and latest browser features
Works uniformly in DOM documents, fragments or XML documents
Utility methods for matching and filtering of elements
Standalone selector parser to produce JavaScript Object representations
Customizable pseudo-classes, attribute operators and combinators
Just 3 kB! (minified and gzipped, 8 kB without gzip)
No dependencies on third-party JS libraries, but developers can override internal methods (like getAttribute) for seamless integration.
Code follows the MooTools philosophy, respecting strict standards, throwing no warnings and using meaningful variable names

And it comes with speed tests:

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