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- From: Paul Prescod <paul@prescod.net>
- To: xml-dev@xml.org
- Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 15:39:09 -0800
"W. Eliot Kimber" wrote:
>
> ...
>
> If you look at the DOM, for example, it simplifies by collapsing some
> properties that are managed as node lists in the grove into simple
> strings (attribute values and PCDATA content), but that useful
> simplification doesn't change the reality that a complete abstract
> representation has to do provide the individual nodes.
Actually, that isn't true. The DOM treats attribute values as node-list
content of attribute nodes and PCDATA content as node-list content of
elements. It does group multiple characters into a single "text" node
but it does so in a way that is implementation dependent and generally
confusing.
The DOM is much more complicated, for reasons both technically sound and
historical, than James Clark's simple grove-based API. A technically
sound reason is that the DOM is writeable whereas that API was not.
Historical reasons include backwards compatibility with DHTML.
--
Paul Prescod - ISOGEN Consulting Engineer speaking for himself
"The calculus and the rich body of mathematical analysis to which it
gave rise made modern science possible, but it was the algorithm that
made possible the modern world."
- from "Advent of the Algorithm" David Berlinski
http://www.opengroup.com/mabooks/015/0151003386.shtml
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