xml-dev - adding addressing capabilities to the DOM

["Aaron Skonnard" <aarons@develop.com>]

After looking over the recently released DOM Level 3 requirements document,
there has been some discussion on adding an addressing API (similar to the
selectNodes function in MSXML). The proposed idea is to introduce a method
on the Node interface that takes a scheme specific addressing expression
(e.g., XPath 1.0, the product of the XQL WG, etc...) and returns a NodeList:

NodeList getNodes(scheme, expression)

The scheme identifies that language used in the expression. Today, the main
standard addressing language in place is XPath 1.0, but this makes the API
extensible for future versions of XPath or other languages (similar to the
way XPointer works). With something like this in place, DOM developers can
harness the power of XPath to simplify typical navigation tasks in a
standard way:

NodeList books = doc.getNodes("xpath", "/books//book[@topic='xml']/author");

The default scheme could also be specified for the entire Document so it
doesn't have to specified on each method call. Similar functionality could
also be added to the the Traversal API (as another constructor type to
NodeIterator and TreeWalker).

In order to help the DOM WG decide on such an issue, the goal of this email
is to gather the general interest level from the xml-dev'ers.

Who wants it?


BTW, if you have an opinion on this, please copy www-dom-request@w3.org in
your response.

-aaron


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