411631 - Don't stall notifications when inserting content into DOM

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 359487

(Core :: DOM: Core & HTML, defect)

Description

[Jonas Sicking (:sicking) No longer reading bugmail consistently]

So many things in life would be less complicated if we always made sure to properly notify content when we inserted things into the DOM while parsing. As it stands now we have to sprinkle Flush calls all over the code whenever we want to make sure that all existing content has been properly notified.

This is made a lot worse by the fact that notifying can end up running script (right?).

Unfortunately notifying always isn't trivial. The reason we're holding off notifications is that that way we can notify for whole subtrees at a time which saves us a lot of notifications and thus performance.

It would be possible to always notify if we instead built up small clusters of DOM trees and inserted those trees instead. This should not result in any more notifications. However, it would result in a lot more BindToTree calls which, costs performance.

However, if we could figure out a way to make that not be a noticeable perf hit we would be in a much happier place, so it's something that would be really worth pursuing.

This bug is going to act both as the place where this will (hopefully) eventually get fixed. It's also a bug to mark dependencies against so that we can track what else can be fixed if we fix this bug.

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Dup of bug 359487?

Comment 2

[Jonas Sicking (:sicking) No longer reading bugmail consistently]

damnit