xml-dev - Re: DOM - Creating Documents

[David Brownell <david-b@pacbell.net>]

Miles Sabin wrote:
> 
> So, there's no DOM-vendor-independent mechanism for
> document creation at the mo' ...

That's the real issue.  Document creation (either empty, or
through connection to an XML processor) is outside scope of
DOM ... but is fundamental for applications using DOM.

So long as that's an issue, vendors achieve some level of
lock-in for DOM apps.  Most of them won't suffer for that,
and won't worry about addressing it until there's customer
demand for it.

Another way to look at this:  you can't write a DOM test suite
until these issues (2 ways to create a "dom.Document") are
resolved.  (Notation and Entity objects can't be created except
implicitly by parsing a DTD, either.)


>	 there _might_ be in
> Level 2, but there's a lot of tricky issues that need to
> be resolved before that can happen.

They're more politically tricky than technically so.  In any
system, bootstrapping calls for a "step out of bounds".  There
are widely known solutions.  Consider what SAX does for finding
parsers, in Java.

DOM Level 2 is the right opportunity to fix this.  Everyone
should require the DOM WG to solve this problem, so that
application code can be portable.  Next time you get a chance
to review a DOM draft, make sure this feedback is received.

- Dave

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