Re: filtering noise (was Re: SAX LexicalHandler::comment issue)

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

> > To me, it comes down to not wanting to be stuck with the
> > syntactic sugar DOM insists on.  I don't see attributes as
> > being in that category, since they hold real data.  I'd rather
> > just not spend the memory.
> 
> That doesn't strike me as a problem of the DOM - it strikes me as a
> processing problem that hasn't been well-solved.

Well, not consistently.  We are in a maze of twisty little passages,
all different ... :)  There are plenty of solutions to this one.


> The DOM (and Infoset, IMHO) need to be able to represent everything XML
> 1.0 offers.  People who need less should be able to turn those things off.

I'd turn that around:  people who need more (in DOM) should be able
to turn them on.  Core APIs should bias towards simplifying; it's easy to
add complexity later (likely even inevitable), but you can't add simplicity
after-the-fact.


> Unfortunately, no one seemed to like the
> controlled-streaming-into-a-tree model at the time these things started,
> and now we've just got pileups.

I think there were plenty of folk who liked it, it's just that they
weren't the ones calling the shots ... :)

One thing to keep in mind is that DOM came out of the
"Dynamic HTML in JavaScript" world, which didn't start
out as a decent (systems) programming language.  The
browser DOM implementations couldn't easily adopt such
models.

- Dave