Question

Using jQuery or straight Javascript, I’m looking for the best way to find the leftmost div (or in general the DOM element with the minimum or maximum position on either axis).

So far I have two solutions:

1. Iterate through the div objects that I want to consider, saving the smallest left position found.
2. Build an array of objects and using javascript’s sort() function with a comparison function that looks at the left property, then choosing the 0th element.

I know that solution 1 would be O(N), but I’m not sure what the efficiency of the sort() function is in most browsers, or if there is a completely different approach.

Answer 1

Consider this:

1. you keep track of one element and one position, you access each element once
2. you keep track of all elements and access all positions multiple times because of sorting

What do you think is the fastest? 🙂