xml-dev - Re: How to ??

[Lauren Wood <lauren@sqwest.bc.ca>]

David Megginson wrote:

> Or more generally, the point that people constantly forget is that the
> DOM is an interface, not a processor -- it provides a means for
> representing the information that is made available to it, which may
> or may not correspond in any obvious way with the information in the
> original XML document (if there ever was an original XML document).

And in fact people could use (some of?) the DOM interfaces to access
documents that never were and never would be XML, simply by treating
objects as elements, attributes etc. The DOM makes no guarantees as
to what the original document was, simply that once you have a
structure model built, you can delete things called elements, change
the content of things called comments, etc.

> If SAX 1.0 made isSpecified information available, the DOM could model
> it; since SAX 1.0 does not make that information available, the DOM
> interface has nothing to pass on.  In other words, this is a
> quality-of-implementation issue, not a conformance issue.

Non-validating parsers don't need to pass this information on to the
DOM structure model either, since they may not have it. And XML
processors may choose not to pass comments on at all, or to
completely expand entity references before building the structure
model. All of which makes those DOM interfaces not relevant to those
documents, although obviously scripts or other applications that
call them shouldn't crash and burn just because the processor
doesn't pass on comments, for example.

Lauren

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