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8/5/2002 12:08:09 AM, Uche Ogbuji <uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com> wrote:
> DOM acted as something of a jail cell restricting me to one approach.
I'd prefer the metaphor of a "spacesuit" rather a "jail cell."
The spacesuit restricts your movements and options, but lets you walk around
on the surface of Alpha Centauri 6 without evolving the gills that natives use
to extract oxygen from an environment that would kill humans :~)
But seriously folks, the point of the language-neutrality
of the DOM is to allow one to move from one environment
to another without changing your basic paradigm. As for myself, I can
barely do squat in Python ... but I can fairly easily port DOM code
from Java or ECMAScript and do things the DOM way in the Python
environment.
Maybe a better metaphor still is that DOM is "pidgin XML" that lets
you move around from one platform, language, and application to another
without learning the native idioms. Great for traders who move around
a lot, not great for settlers who commit to one set of idioms and
want to be fully integrated into the local culture. And picking up
a point that I believe Dare made yesterday, it would be absurd for some
international organization to mandate that only pidgin (or Esperanto)
be spoken, but it might make sense to standardize a minimal common
language and teach it to potential travellers and the travel industry.
DOM, metaphorically speaking, lets a traveller from China check into
a hotel and order a meal in Germany; it will not enable him/her to
appreciate the deeper beauties of Goethe's language.
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