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From: Mayayana on 15 Apr 2010 14:22

| The META tag is used to describe the HTML document.
| You can give it any name/content values you like, whatever
| makes sense for the document. Some common uses are
| described at W3schools:
|

Thanks, but I know all of that. I do a lot with web
design, HTAs, scripting, etc. I even once wrote a
WYSIWYG HTML editor as a vbscript-powered HTA,
to provide people with a "live" documentation of the
IE DOM.

I'm not trying to find out about the DOM.... I don't
know how else to explain this. If you look at the docs
for "all" you'll see that META is not listed in
"applies to". Further, All("description") and
All("keywords") refer to *attributes* of the META tag.
Yet the document.All collection is supposed to return
elements, not element attributes. I've never seen that
before. It's like using All.("valign") or All.("width") to
get a collection of valign or width values. (I haven't tried
anything like that, but I doubt that it works. And of
course it wouldn't be of much use.)

So what I was curious to find out about is a list
of these irregular properties/functions that are not
documented in any docs that I've ever seen -- and
that cannot be inferred to exist from the structure
of the DOM.



From: Mayayana on 15 Apr 2010 14:48
Hmm. Here's an interesting one. I just tried
looping through a typical webpage:

For i = 0 to document.all.length - 1
s = s & document.all(i).tagName & ", "
Next

s:

HTML, HEAD, TITLE, META, META, META, LINK, BODY, SCRIPT, DIV, !, TABLE,
TBODY, TR, TD, IMG, TD, IMG, TABLE, TBODY, TR, TD, TD, TABLE, !, TBODY, TR,
TD, !, !, TD, TABLE, TBODY, ....etc.

So it does return ! for a comment. And it returns all
other tags, including HEAD, META, etc.

That still leaves the question of where all.("description")
is coming from. (I'd mistakenly called Description an
attribute above, but it's actually just a value for the
NAME attribute. So all.("description") is a bit like
referring to All.("#FFFFFF"). Strange.


From: Larry Serflaten on 15 Apr 2010 20:10

"Mayayana" <mayayana(a)invalid.nospam> wrote

> So what I was curious to find out about is a list
> of these irregular properties/functions that are not
> documented in any docs that I've ever seen -- and
> that cannot be inferred to exist from the structure
> of the DOM.

Did you click on the name link as I suggested?

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_meta_name.asp

The common names are listed with descriptions. But
you can hardly expect to find a complete list because
the name and content can hold anything you give it.

That's a bit like asking what are all the possible values
that a string variable can hold. The list is virtually
unlimited....

LFS


From: Mayayana on 15 Apr 2010 21:27
I appreciate your efforts, but you either don't
understand the DOM or are not reading my
posts fully.

*I know about the DOM.*
I know about META tags.

This code will show the content of the META tag
with a name of "DESCRIPTION":

Sub window_onload()
Dim s, i
For i = 0 to document.all.length - 1
If document.all(i).tagName = "META" Then
If document.all(i).name = "DESCRIPTION" Then
MsgBox document.all(i).content
Exit For
End If
End If
Next
End Sub

That's an interesting find, which I was not aware of
before, *because MSDN does not list META in the
All collection*.

OK. So far so good. But now it turns out that
one can return the same thing with:

doccument.all("description")

That's very strange. It's not in accord with the
normal usage of the DOM. Everything found in the
All collection is an *element*. In the code above,
document.all(i) references an element. Do you know the
difference between an element and an attribute?
META is an element. NAME is an attribute. "Description"
is just the value of the NAME attribute of a META
element. So why does document.all("description")
work? And what else works that we don't know
about?

That's what I'm wondering about. DOM, the Missing
Manual, so to speak. It may be that META is a lone
abberation. I don't know.

| Did you click on the name link as I suggested?
|
| http://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_meta_name.asp
|
| The common names are listed with descriptions. But
| you can hardly expect to find a complete list because
| the name and content can hold anything you give it.
|
| That's a bit like asking what are all the possible values
| that a string variable can hold. The list is virtually
| unlimited....
|
| LFS
|
|


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