I've recently had the need to improve jQuery's selector support for XML

nodes with prefixes. In theory, it should be possible for a node with

the node name "D:response" to be selected using just "response", in

accordance with getElementsByTagName's rules. There's two issues that

prevent that, which I've included fixes for.

The first is that IE supports getElementsByTagName incorrectly, and

treats prefixes as part of the tag name. Using rev 234, lines 1228-1233

could be replaced with this:

for ( var i = 0; i < ret.length; i++ ) {
  // create an array of tagnames to search for
  var tags = {};

  // fix for IE leaving in node prefixes
  if (jQuery.browser.msie && ret[i].xml !== undefined && m[2] != '*')
    for (var regex = new RegExp('</?((?:[^:]+:)?' + m[2] + ')\\b', 'g'), tag;
      (tag = regex.exec(ret[i].xml)) != null; tags[tag[1]] = true);
  else tags[m[2]] = true;

  for ( var tag in tags )
    r = jQuery.merge( r, tag == "*" ?
      jQuery.getAll(ret[i]) :
       ret[i].getElementsByTagName(tag));
}

If it detects that we're searching an XML document and IE is being used,

it'll find all node names with the correct local name, get their

complete node names with prefixes, and search for each of those in turn.

If IE is not being used or we're searching an HTML document, it'll

search only for the specified tag name, so the overhead seems rather

minimal.

The second issue is that jQuery prevents nodes with prefixes from being

preserved in the filter function, specifically because of line 1014:

"": "m[2]== '*'||a.nodeName.toUpperCase()==m[2].toUpperCase()",

Which could be replaced with:

"": "m[2]== '*'||a.nodeName.replace(/[^:]+:/,
'').toUpperCase()==m[2].toUpperCase()";

That'll make sure only the local name is being compared instead of the

complete node name. (The best solution would be to use a.localName, but

IE doesn't support it, of course...)

If you could look this over and send a reply, I'd be very grateful.

— Mitchell Lane

PS: The next step to this would be adding support for a namespace

resolver, perhaps as a third parameter of $() and by using the CSS

syntax ("D|response"). Would you have any interest if I were to try and

write support for that?