Intent to Deprecate: Range.compareNode() and Range.expand()

Philip Jägenstedt

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Dec 20, 2014, 6:59:31 PM12/20/14

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Primary eng (and PM) emails

phi...@opera.com

Summary

Deprecate Range.compareNode() and Range.expand().

Motivation

These are non-standard extensions to the Range interface introduced in 2006 and 2009 respectively:

https://trac.webkit.org/changeset/48271
https://trac.webkit.org/changeset/16302

compareNode() was once in Gecko, but was removed in 1.9:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/range.compareNode

expand() is a little bit like IE's TextRange.expand():

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/ms536421%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

Neither is currently supported on Range by Firefox or IE, and neither has been standardized:

https://dom.spec.whatwg.org/#interface-range

Compatibility Risk

Exceptions will be thrown, unlimited breakage possible in theory.

Alternative implementation suggestion for web developers

Range.compareNode() => Range.compareBoundaryPoints() is the advice given in the MDN page.

Range.expand() => Selection.modify(), which is currently non-standard but will probably end up in the spec: https://github.com/w3c/selection-api/issues/37

The interoperability here doesn't look great, so whatever changes are made will need to be tested carefully in shipping browsers, not just work per spec.

Usage information from UseCounter

https://www.chromestatus.com/metrics/feature/timeline/popularity/392

https://www.chromestatus.com/metrics/feature/timeline/popularity/393

These are both much lower than many removals, with 0.0006% being the highest recorded usage for Range.expand().

Entry on chromestatus.com, crbug.com, or MDN

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/range.compareNode

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/ms536421%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

Requesting approval to remove too?

No. While usage is low, these have been around for a while, so let the deprecation sit for a bit to see if anyone objects.