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In changing Attributes from being Nodes to being just regular objects, this property got dropped. It seems to me that just because an Attribute is no longer a Node that that doesn't alter the fact that it still has an 'owning element'. I do have use cases whereby I am holding an Attribute (Node - for now, object - for the future) where I need to 'refer back' to the owning element. Browsers are starting to implement pieces of L4 and this is now a breaking change. I would propose it's reintroduction as a property of Attribute.
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the Editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the Tracker Issue; or you may create a Tracker Issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document: http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html Status: Accepted Change Description: Reintroduced ownerElement (from cherry-pick) Rationale: This is implemented, useful, and used. http://w3c.github.io/dom/index.html#dom-attr-ownerelement
Actually, I am going to have to revert this decision (I just did in fact). I mistakenly thought that the upstream spec had reintroduced ownerElement (as discussed on www-dom) and that this bug was because I'd screwed up syncing with it. But it turns out that it was indeed added, but then removed. We're committed to tracking the upstream specification (http://dom.spec.whatwg.org/) and only differing from it by subsetting or small non-normative blah like the boilerplate. Please track the upstream bug (which is still open) for further discussion: https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=25086. Note that while it is supported in Gecko and WebKit, it has recently been removed from Blink which ought to indicate that it is not needed. If you have data indicating the contrary, it would be a great idea to share it.