Re: DOM L2 comments, various

>Many argued in vain against the use of NodeType to
>begin with. The argument was that it was redundant,
>since each node type was represented by a unique
>interface.

Not all languages support runtime type ID. nodeType is required by those that
don't.

Extending the exceptions doesn't bother me; that shouldn't break applications.
Encountering an unexpected/undefined node type seems more likely to cause
breakage in code that conforms to the DOM spec, and I'm still not really
comfortable with it. I'm willing to refrain from explicitly forbidding the use
of negative numbers for user-created nodes; I'm not convinced that we should
bless this use by mentioning it in the spec, since that places a requirement on
all application authors to recognize and ignore those nodes ... and the
semantics of ignoring them may be nontrivial.
______________________________________
Joe Kesselman  / IBM Research

Received on Monday, 4 October 1999 16:37:02 UTC