>>This seems disastrous.

>makes me nervious, i don't want to be the guy who breaks stuff, if we go with your solution – it would definitely will not break anything, if we go with mine – it would definitely will, affected amount of code can be relatively small comparing to all code that relies on jQuery but it can be big in absolute numbers, even if that code, in some sence, is strange and exceptional. So if you feel strongly about it, perhaps i should abandon my view and we should land [this](https://github.com/jquery/jquery/pull/1146) patch instead.

Sorry that was a bit melodramatic, but I do feel that such a significant change of behavior (even if that change is limited to input never officially recognized as valid) is not acceptable in a patch release. This has direct parallels to 6c2a501de40a5f6b3ad382e2d309e5a10fce04d0, whose landing in 1.7.2 instead of 1.8 broke TinyMCE's assumptions and generated probably a couple dozen tickets on our end.

> I don't think there could be a compromise, 1.9.x API should be the same as in 2.0, right?

The **documented** API, I would say. We're free to have the two versions behave differently for invalid input; we just need to be careful about exercising that freedom. And although my preference is liberal acceptance in traversing (historically true but never guaranteed), it's just as reasonable to take an "elements only" stance—as long as we give enough notice.