Re: adding addressing capabilities to the DOM

Can someone explain this point to me?

keshlam@us.ibm.com wrote:
...
> 
> 1) It is not particularly difficult to implement querying as an operation
> upon the DOM, rather than within the DOM. (Liveness issues are a challenge,
> but DOM Level 2, via mutation events may address these, especially if Level
> 3 adds "listener groups" as has been proposed.)
> 

I seen this point made before, normally as a response to the suggestion
that xpath be included in a future build of the DOM.

But it seems to me that there couldn't be a worse function to build
"upon", rather than "within" the DOM. Whatever the cost of crossing the
component boundary, will be multiplied by the cost, potentially, of
traversing the entire document data structure. Additionally, if any kind
of indexing is implemented then you are effectively replicating the
document's tree structure and values outside the DOM.

I'm not an expert in this area, so please tell me if I've misunderstood
the issues, but it strikes me as making as much sense as the case for
not building a database query language into a databse engine.

Francis.

Received on Wednesday, 19 April 2000 07:08:59 UTC