RE: Question about getNextSibling/getPre

At 04:35 AM 3/10/98 -0500, Alfie Kirkpatrick wrote:
>Mike,
>
>Thanks a lot for the reply. My point is really that DOM nodes
>may contain nodes from different implementors, correct? 

This question keeps coming up, but I don't really understand the scenario:
You're writing an application and exposing the DOM as its API; how will
you get nodes from different implementors in YOUR application?  Forgive
me if I'm missing something obvious here ...


>Perhaps there should be a statement in the DOM spec about
>whether or not nodes from different implementations can be
>mixed.

I'd be glad to write such a statement, but again it would help to
understand a plausible scenario that we're forbidding.  I suspect that you
could use mix nodes from COM or CORBA compliant implementations, but that
would be leveraging the capabilities that those programming architectures
bring to the table.  Random thought: Are we confusing people by calling DOM
an "object model", so that people assume it has the kind of
cross-application, cross-language, (and possibly cross-machine) referencing
capabilities of COM/DCOM and CORBA?  Maybe this DOES need clarification ...
Obviously, we plan to let Microsoft and OMG do their thing, and we'll do
ours; they should complement each other, but have very minimal overlap.
Even more random thought: I *hope* no one expects us to be coming up with a
meta-object model that will subsume both and make them inter-operable  ...
well, we were GOING to do that, but we thought we'd take on the task of
bringing peace to the Middle East first ;~)

>
>This brings up a related point. In COM, interfaces are identified
>by GUIDs. Are there plans to release a Microsoft COM IDL file
>which people can use for implementations? Otherwise, it will
>be much harder for C++ applications to work with nodes from
>different implementations. I'd be willing to help with this effort
>since I have a fairly complete IDL file already.

Microsoft says they will release a COM IDL translation of the CORBA IDL DOM
spec as a "W3C Note" shortly after the DOM is finalized. Others who want to
translate the DOM IDL to the language of their choice (Perl? Scheme? Tcl?)
can do likewise.


Mike Champion

Received on Tuesday, 10 March 1998 09:31:18 UTC