The new version of DOMAssistant, 2.7, is finally out and my impression is that it is a very stable and solid release. Faster CSS selector performance, new features while at the same time a smaller file size.

New features

Unicode support added

We have added complete Unicode support, to have source documents in basically any language. Take a look at the Slickspeed Unicode test to see how it fares. A little hint: the DOMAssistant column is the one getting it right. 🙂

Complete documentation in Chinese

I think it’s quite exciting that we can now offer our Chinese-speaking users a complete documentation in Chinese! And if anyone wonders, I have learned that while Cantonese and Mandarin is spoken differently from each other, the written language is the same.

New methods

A number of new useful methods have been added as well:

• cssSelect
• ajax
• setStyle
• setErrorHandling
• first

Vastly improved CSS selector performance

While we already had the overall fastest CSS selector performance with the 2.6 release, we have turned it up a notch; we were also haunted by not being the fastest JavaScript library in Internet Explorer. However, I have to say that the team really rose to the occasion, and now we have the fastest CSS selector performance in IE as well (results may vary… 🙂 ).

Try the Slickspeed test to see the new results!

Fixes

Naturally we have also taken the time to fix or improve already existing functionality. Here’s a list of what we’ve done:

• Fixed so a function for an event, applied with addEvent, couldn’t be added multiple times.
• Fixed so a function in DOMReady couldn’t be applied multiple times.
• Accuracy fixes for XPath’s ends-with() implementation of E[att$=value].
• Accuracy fixes for nth-child selector.
• Accuracy fixes for ~ selector and contains in Internet Explorer.
• Fix for what’s allowed following a child/sibling combinator.
• Fix for attribute selector to support values that contain spaces.
• Fix for what’s returned from the prev and next methods, so it has the correct methods applied.

Try it out!

We think this is a great release, and naturally we think that you should download DOMAssistant and give it a go!

Join us in the world DOMination! 😀