While not as pretty as querySelectorAll (which has a litany of issues), here's a very flexible function that recurses the DOM and should work in most browsers (old and new). As long as the browser supports your condition (ie: data attributes), you should be able to retrieve the element.
To the curious: Don't bother testing this vs. QSA on jsPerf. Browsers like Opera 11 will cache the query and skew the results.
Code:
function recurseDOM(start, whitelist)
{
/*
* @start: Node - Specifies point of entry for recursion
* @whitelist: Object - Specifies permitted nodeTypes to collect
*/
var i = 0,
startIsNode = !!start && !!start.nodeType,
startHasChildNodes = !!start.childNodes && !!start.childNodes.length,
nodes, node, nodeHasChildNodes;
if(startIsNode && startHasChildNodes)
{
nodes = start.childNodes;
for(i;i<nodes.length;i++)
{
node = nodes[i];
nodeHasChildNodes = !!node.childNodes && !!node.childNodes.length;
if(!whitelist || whitelist[node.nodeType])
{
//condition here
if(!!node.dataset && !!node.dataset.foo)
{
//handle results here
}
if(nodeHasChildNodes)
{
recurseDOM(node, whitelist);
}
}
node = null;
nodeHasChildNodes = null;
}
}
}
You can then initiate it with the following:
recurseDOM(document.body, {"1": 1}); for speed, or just recurseDOM(document.body);
Example with your specification: http://jsbin.com/unajot/1/edit
Example with differing specification: http://jsbin.com/unajot/2/edit