Selectors API was again published as a Last Call on 14 November. For anyone who hasn’t heard about this before, this is an API designed for selecting elements in the DOM by querying using Selectors, as used in CSS.

This is expected to be the last round before proceeding to Candidate Recommendation around mid-December. If you have any further comments to make, you have until 12 December to send them in, preferably to public-webapi@w3.org and to ensure I don’t miss it, please include [selectors-api] in the subject.

The implementations of API have progressed nicely, with each of the for major browsers: Firefox, Opera, Safari and IE, expected to include support in their next major release. JavaScript libraries, such as JQuery, are also expected to take advantage of the feature in upcoming releases, which should mean performance improvements for users with updated browsers; although they will continue to fall back to their own script-based implementations in older browsers.

Today, the Selectors API specification has been published as a Last Call Working Draft. Assuming all goes well, and there are no comments requiring substantial changes over the 4 week review period, the spec will go to Candidate Recommendation shortly after, at which point it will remain until there are two interoperable implementations. Although the spec says comments are welcome until 2008-01-06, this is likely to be extended by a couple of weeks due to the delay in publishing.

I need to begin work on a test suite for it very soon so that we can help ensure interoperable implementations with as few bugs as possible. It would be nice to see this implemented in the major browsers soon, although I could only speculate about when each one will.

2 months ago, I reported that I had resolved the Selectors API naming debate. Well, sadly, those names didn’t work out and I got overruled :-(. We ended up holding a Working Group vote to resolve the issue and, as a result, a new set of names were chosen.

The winners were announced just over a week ago: querySelector() and querySelectorAll(). These names already appear in the editors draft, which will soon be publised as a Last Call Working Draft.