README

Dodo

Dodo is a port of Domino.js to PHP, in order to provide a more performant and spec-compliant DOM library than the DOMDocument PHP classes (xml extension), which is built on libxml2.

Dodo uses a PHP binding for WebIDL defined by IDLeDOM. Details of the WebIDL binding can be found in the IDLeDOM documentation.

Additional documentation about the library can be found on MediaWiki.org.

Report issues on Phabricator.

Install

This package is available on Packagist:

$ composer require wikimedia/dodo

Usage

A better set of examples and tests is coming. For an extremely basic usage, see tests/DodoTest.php.

Tests

$ composer test

Status

This software is near completion, from the perspective of DOM features used by Parsoid. Completing the last missing features/fixing the last remaining bugs to allow Parsoid to run with Dodo as its DOM library is the prime objective.

After that, performance benchmarking and tuning will be in order.

We run many but not all W3C and WPT tests. Some of these depend on JavaScript-specific features and as such will probably always be skipped. The "known failures" framework we use could use some improvement in order to provide more granular results.

Background

(taken from this page)

The PHP DOM extension is a wrapper around libxml2 with a thin layer of DOM-compatibility on top ("To some extent libxml2 provides support for the following additional specifications but doesn't claim to implement them completely [...] Document Object Model (DOM) Level 2 Core [...] but it doesn't implement the API itself, gdome2 does this on top of libxml2").

This is not really remotely close to a modern standards-compliant HTML5 DOM implementation and is barely maintained, much less kept in sync with the WHATWG's pace of change.

The Dodo library implements PHP interfaces generated directly from the WebIDL sources included in the WHATWG DOM specification by IDLeDOM.

Developer Notes

Why you need accessors for interface properties

Most DOM implementations have to make a decision about adapting the specification's notion of an interface property. In many languages, the only solution is to use accessor functions, e.g. getFoo() and setFoo(value) and prevent direct access to the properties themselves.

This is not contrary to the spec's intention, as it is mostly capturing data representation, and seems to expect some level of indirection between the library that implements the specification, and the code which calls that library.

Aside from the usual arguments and reasons for preferring accessors over direct property access and vice-versa, in this case most implementations are forced down the accessor route for one reason in particular, and that is that the current DOM Specification defines certain interface properties as being readonly, for example the Attr interface:

interface Attr : Node {
  readonly attribute DOMString? namespaceURI;
  readonly attribute DOMString? prefix;
  readonly attribute DOMString localName;
  readonly attribute DOMString name;
  [CEReactions] attribute DOMString value;

  readonly attribute Element? ownerElement;

  readonly attribute boolean specified; // useless; always returns true
};

This essentially means that once their value has been set once (in the constructor), it cannot be modified, but can still be accessed.

PHP currently lacks a way to implement readonly properties without incurring significant performance penalties. Although there have been several RFCs (readonly properties and property accessors syntax), they have always been declined.

So, in the PHP binding for WebIDL which Dodo uses, we have explicit accessors for each WebIDL property. If a class property "foo" is not marked readonly, then there will be methods getFoo() and setFoo($value) defined on the class. If "foo" is marked readonly, then only getFoo() will be defined on the class.

We bridge the gap between the spec and common usage by defining special "magic methods" (__get, __set, etc) in order to support the common $obj->foo style of access. These will be less-performant than accessing the appropriate getFoo or setFoo method directly, and so for performance Dodo internally avoids using this style of access.

However, if you're reading this, and PHP has passed an RFC with improved JavaScript-style property accessor functions, you know what to do: replace the __get and __set magic methods with appropriate property accessors. (This can probably be done in IDLeDOM's generated Helper classes, and may not actually need any code change in Dodo itself.)

Strings specified as "NULL or non-empty"

It isn't uncommon for interface properties to have type written DOMString?, which is not a single type, but rather indicates that the field may take either of type NULL, or type DOMString (they are distinct types).

For example, the namespaceURI property from the Attr interface:

interface Attr : Node {
  readonly attribute DOMString? namespaceURI;
  /* ... */
};

However, it's common for there to be an additional constraint on the value of such properties, one which is not visible from inspection of the interface definition in IDL.

For example, namespaceURI is defined to return the namespace, which is either "NULL or a non-empty string".

Well, this is a bit annoying because it's certainly possible to provide the empty string to any interface which accepts arguments of type DOMString.

Because of this common stipulation, you would find in the code something that looks like:

class Attr extends Node
{
        protected $namespaceURI = NULL;

        public function construct(string? $namespace=NULL /* ... other arguments ... */)
        {
                if ($namespace !== '') {
                        $this->$namespaceURI = $namespace;
                }

                /* ... */
        }

        /* ... */
}

The caller can provide either a string or NULL, but the assignment will only occur if it is NOT the empty string. In that case, $this->$namespaceURI will retain its default value of NULL.

Strings specified as "non-empty"

This seems simpler, but it's actually worse than "NULL or non-empty"!

Properties that must be "non-empty strings", such as localName, are usually integral to the object functioning properly. localName, for example, is the name of the attribute.

Unfortunately, an empty string is also a string, and even a DOMString. So providing the empty string is valid when the function's argument type is DOMString (or string, in PHP's type hinting). But in the case of constructors, once we find out that this argument is the empty string, the entire object is undefined.

But in PHP, it's not possible to "abort" the constructor -- an object of the specified class will always be returned to the caller. In old versions of PHP, you could actually do something like unset($this) inside the constructor. Pretty cool, but you haven't been able to do it for years. What a pain...

So we probably have to throw an Exception, or make a "non-empty string" class.

Readonly does not mean immutable

Read-only/read-write and mutable/immutable

These are not equivalent, though it seems at first they might be.

    Immutable <=> read-only
    Read-write => mutable

But

    mutable =/> read-write

For example, on an Attr object, ownerElement is a read-only property, but it can still change if we associate the Attr node with another element.

For another example, the name property of an attribute is read-only, but the prefix property is read-write, and since I can mutate the prefix property, I can mutate the name (which includes this prefix), thus making the name property mutable, even if it's read-only.

Basically, there are properties where even if you can't update them directly, you can update something that is used to compute their value.

Methods that are somewhere between abstract and concrete...

The Node interface methods isEqualNode and cloneNode are two good examples of things that are annoying. Both of them first do something that is common among all Node objects, and then proceed to do something that is unique to whatever class has extended Node, for example Attr.

That means that if you want to implement them as abstract, you have to include this boilerplate Node-common stuff in all of the subclass implementations of the abstract method. What a pain.

So instead, we have abstract methods like _subclass_isEqualNode, which are called by Node::isEqualNode when it's time to do the subclass-specific part.

Other readability conventions

• If a property accessor or method is part of the spec, it is written exactly as in the spec IDL (naturally).
• If a property or method is for internal-use, it is prefixed with '_'.

Potential bugs in Domino.js

It appears that HTMLCollection will not recompute the cache when an Element's id or name attribute changes. However, these are used to index two internal caches, and so the HTMLCollection will no longer be "live".

Solution would be to update lastModTime when those attributes are mutated.

Performance tips

• Make sure your Element ids stay unique. The spec requires that you return the first Element with that id, in document order, and it is not very performant to compute the document order.

License and Credits

The initial version of this code was written by Jason Linehan. Further improvements were made by C. Scott Ananian (IDLeDOM, bug fixes, missing features) and Tim Abdullin (test suite).

This code is (c) Copyright 2019-2025 Wikimedia Foundation. It is distributed under the MIT license; see LICENSE for more info.