How to struggle with incompetence of mavens ?

Question

Preamble: I like my digital subscription of some computer magazine (no advertisement!), it contains cool weekly digest of programmers useful links. I'm not going to place it there to avoid raising interest. The last issue contained something "30 best practices to your web application performance"

The first rule declares "Limit interaction with DOM as much as possible... Consider setting innerHTML over document.createElement/appendChild()...."

From my point of view - this is rubbish, and I wrote small HTML that proof my point of view (if somebody interesting it is placed there http://codepad.org/XxAH6sLZ )

My proof is true for Opera, Chrome, IE, Firefox browsers and shows performance of DOM 10-50%

I have tried to argue to author about it, but my comment was banned.

At last my question is not about HTML or jscript, so here it is: how to struggle with wittingly false knowledge distributed over Internet, found by Google.

Answer 1

Just like in other media: write something better and hope people pick up on it. If there was a legal right to get printed in the original magazine, as there is for slander, abuse would abound.

Answer 2

Greetings,

I have experienced speed ups in replacing DOM based code with innerHTML code, especially on Safari. Your example is fairly naive and not representative of the real world, you are not setting id's or classnames or adding event handlers or doing nested divs or anything fancy.

In all fairness, I modified your test code and added some more stuff and DOM remained faster, even on Safari. So I am not really sure where the catch is..

T.