Project topic posted by Pat Morin (more info)

Faster and More Flexible Searching in the HTML DOM

The HTML DOM describes how an (X)HTML/XML document can be represented as a tree and gives a mapping of the parts of this tree to objects. The implementation of the HTML DOM in JavaScript is what makes dynamic web pages possible. One of the most common operations in the HTML DOM is to find all elements in the document with a given ID, Name, or Tag Name (document.getElementById(), document.getElementsByName(), document.getElementsByTagName()).

Spend a bit of time experimenting with this script and you will soon find that these methods work by traversing the entire tree to find the node(s) being searched for. There are much more efficient ways of doing this (hashtables come to mind), and JavaScript is such a flexible language that you can easily modify the DOM implementation to use these instead.

This project would involve designing and implementing an efficient data structure that is integrated with the JavaScript DOM implementation that allows these operations to be executed efficiently. This project requires, at the very least, an advanced knowledge of data structure design techniques and strong programming ability.