Re: JAXP and Java XML APIs (was RE: [xml-dev] difference bet. xercesand crimson)

[Ronald Bourret <rpbourret@rpbourret.com>]

"Champion, Mike" wrote:
> I'd be very interested in hearing a more detailed explanation of the
> "difficulty in the DOM model".  (I'm hopelessly biased, having spent the
> last four years on the DOM WG -- but trying to be open minded!).

I'm a pretty simplistic user of the DOM, but the things that have caused
me to jump through the most hoops are as follows, in order of the amount
of work they have caused me. (My apologies if DOM 2 or 3 already solves
these -- I admit I haven't kept up with the specs.)

1) Lack of DTD info.

2) Lack of normalization. A normalize function that just slaps text
nodes together is great for editors, but useless for data-centric people
like me. I want a way to normalize everything (text, cdata, entity
references, etc.) so all that's left are element, attribute, and text
nodes.

3) Lack of serialization/printing. (Solved in DOM 3, if I remember
correctly.)

4) Lack of a way to create an empty document. (Solved in DOM 2 or 3?)

5) Lack of a way to create new entities. This is very useful if I want
to create unparsed entities as a way to return BLOBs from a database.
Solved in the new DTD stuff, perhaps?

But none of this is worth several months worth of effort. As I recall,
(1) took several weeks of work spread out over a year, (2) was annoying
and took about a week in the midst of learning Java, XML, and the DOM,
(3) and (4) weren't hard and took about a day each, and (5) I still
don't have a solution for. 

-- Ron