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Eric van der Vlist wrote:
> On Fri, 2002-09-20 at 23:20, Arjun Ray wrote:
> > Joe English <jenglish@flightlab.com> wrote:
> >
> > | There were and are plenty of language-specific APIs for SGML/XML
> > | processing, and none of them need to interoperate with each other.
> > | This isn't something that the W3C needs to standardize IMO.
> >
> > I agree. The formlization of an infoset spec is not only enough, it makes
> > DOM irrelevant.
>
> Aren't there places were interoperable APIs are most needed? What about
> parsers?
For Java, SAX plays this role pretty well, and many other
languages have rough equivalents to SAX. But there's absolutely
no need for the Java interface to be compatible with, say, the
Perl or Python interfaces. A "language-neutral" specification
doesn't help any, and can actually make things worse. Better to
have customized APIs that better fit the language.
> This is still a major interoperability issue for web developers
> even with recent versions of browsers, maybe not for the DOM, but we
> have no way to control for instance client side transformations in a
> browser.
Browsers -- in particular, JavaScript implementations in
browsers -- are one area where the DOM makes the most sense.
Here interoperability across multiple implementations is
very important. (Also, the DOM, while supposedly "language-neutral",
is actually heavily biased in favor of languages that support
a certain type of object model, JavaScript being one such.)
> I don't want to discuss if it should be done by the W3C or not, but
> there still are contexts in which interoperable and standardized APIs
> are badly needed!
--Joe English
jenglish@flightlab.com
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