$C = function(string) {
var D = document.createElement(‘div’);
try { D.innerHTML = string; } catch(e) {}
if (D.hasChildNodes())
return D.childNodes.length == 1 ? D.firstChild : D.childNodes;
return null;
};

I personally prefer innerHTML – PPK’s test case shows why. I think it’s quicker because internal DOM building on very low level is used implicitly to build the DOM instead of explicit JavaScript methods. If your code MAY not be valid simply use try .. catch.

Quote from http://www.quirksmode.org/dom/innerhtml.html:

The most obvious conclusion of these tests is that innerHTML is faster than “real” W3C DOM methods in all browsers. The W3C DOM table methods are slow to very slow, especially in Explorer.

It would be good to see more benchmarks but I trust the quirksmode results enough to think that other tests aren’t going to produce results that are significantly different. Or at least not different enough in IE (who doesn’t love Firefox but there’s no getting away from the fact that it’s dominant) to make DOM object creation viable, if you care about speed of execution.

I dunno, maybe I’ve got optimisation OCD. I’ll shut up now, I promise.

Ext.DomHelper.append( myDiv, {
style: 'width:100%;border:1px solid blue;',
cls: 'testClass',
cn: {tag: 'a', href: 'http://www.google.com/',
cn: {tag: 'span', html: 'Google' }
}
});

well if 90 ms is fast. id like to see more DOM creation benchmarking – now that selector-speed has been done to death

Ooh, and string concatenation can be quite nice with a C# style StringBuilder function based on array push and join.

And another thing, blah blah blah…

There’s just no shutting up us whiners :)

It sounds like the argument being made here is that no one should use a DOM creation class at all, and we should just be sticking with raw innerHTML all the time. That’s fine by me, if you prefer it.

But the entire point of this class is to give you the option to use a shorthand method that most of us already know with the CSS query syntax already in most libraries today.

Still, FWIW I stand by the logic of what I said, if not the tone :)

http://www.quirksmode.org/dom/innerhtml.html

Why reinvent the wheel and make it square, unlesss you’re driven by standards OCD?