13 seconds: Attribute vs. ID selectors in jQuery
categories: javascript, jquery
Before:
// select all elements with an id or name attribute of fieldName; // some are inputs (name attribute), some are td's (id attribute) var $field = $('#' + fieldName + ', [name=' + fieldName + ']');
After:
// give inputs both a name and an id attribute, // and then just select fields and td's via id var $field = $('#' + fieldName);
Savings: 13 seconds over the course of selecting > 100 elements. Thank god for Firebug's profiler, which pointed me to the problem in a few seconds. Attribute selectors in jQuery are handy, OK, but they don't seem to work for large-scale selections.
A side note: vim made the HTML change easy, once I worked through its quirky regexp syntax which requires you to escape the +:
s/name="\([^"]\+\)" /name="\1" id="\1" /g
