I've been thinking about what we can do to simplify the creation of new elements
using the DOM. I came up with a few ideas in the SVG WG, and I wondered what you
think about the following one (and how implementable it is in Mozilla). Please
bear with me to the end of the email.

It's really tedious and error prone that you have to do:

  c = document.createElement('NS-people-dont-know-or-want-to-type', 'circle');
  c.setAttribute('cx', '10');
  c.setAttribute('cy', '10');
  c.setAttribute('r', '10');
  svgElement.appendChild(c);

Much better would be:

  c = svgElement.createElement('circle', { cx: 10, cy: 10, r: 10} );
  svgElement.appendChild(c);

or even just:

  c = svgElement.createChild('circle', { cx: 10, cy: 10, r: 10} );

Basically, we'd add a createElement method to the Element interface, have it
create the new element in the same namespace as the element on which it's
called, and allow an (optional) JS object literal to be passed in to specify
attributes.

Apparently WebIDL will allow us to have optional arguments (for the attributes
argument) and to have PropertyBag type interfaces that ECMAScript bindings could
allow JS object literals to be substituted for. So it seems this could be done
spec-wise.

To avoid differences with the createElement method on the Document interface, it
would seem desirable to make the Document version behavior in a similar way with
regards to namespaces. HTML5 changes the behavior of Document.createElement to
always make it create an element in the HTML namespace (instead of the null
namespace) when called on an HTML document, so I was wondering if we could do
the same for SVG documents. At that point though, it seems like a cleaner and
more consistent solution would be to simply say that Document.createElement
creates an element in the same namespace as the document element (or null only
if it doesn't have a document element).

So it seems to me that the changes proposed are highly desirable from the user's
point of view, and that they're also specifiable. I guess it just comes down to
whether changing Document.createElement in this way would break much content
(doubtful since we'd be talking about non-HTML content?), and whether it's
implementable. Even if it would break small amounts of content, maybe it's worth
it if it's a solid step towards resolving the "namespaces are a nightmare" issue.

Thoughts?

Jonathan