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At 11:08 PM -0500 1/7/02, Mike Champion wrote:
>It is indeed a "big honkin' mess" but it's not clear in my mind whose mess it
>is or who can clean it up. I must confess that after several years of
>discussions of how to define an API that is simultaneously compatible
>with XML syntax, DOM Level n-1, the Namespaces Rec, robust when things
>are added to or moved around in the tree, minimally inconvenient to
>XPath users,
>implementable without armies of programmers and testers ...
My personal opinion? Throw out the requirement for DOM N-1
compatibility. Then throw out IDL, and define separate APIs for each
language of interest.
Of course, if the W3C doesn't do this, others will, as witness JDOM,
dom4j, ElectricXML, and more. And I think programmers will use them
too. I think JDOM is a little underpowered and made some wrong design
choices that severely limit its utility on the high end, which is why
I'm still using DOM despite all its problems. But I think most
programmers have more basic needs than me; particularly ones who just
want to read and generate and perhaps validate some simple documents,
much prefer APIs like JDOM. JDOM's a real triumph of worse is better.
--
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| The XML Bible, 2nd Edition (Hungry Minds, 2001) |
| http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/books/bible2/ |
| http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764547607/cafeaulaitA/ |
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