Re: Intent of ER-XML

On Feb 27, 2012, at 19:19 , David Carlisle wrote:
> The second phase is (currently) described as building a DOM tree but it
> only uses the language of nodes and attributes, so DOM is just being
> used as an abstract tree description. It doesn't use any methods from a
> DOM API as far as I can see.

Right — the point is to have a well-defined common understanding of what an element, attribute, etc. are. The fact that it maps onto something that one can immediately implement is, I find, very helpful in making it concrete.

> So long as the final wording makes it clear that it is conformant to
> implement an xml-er parser by (say) representing the final output tree
> by a series of sax events (or as a string representing a well formed
> document) then I don't have any particular issues with the style in the
> current draft.

I don't think that that would be a problem. (It would be technically difficult to do this usefully on an HTML parser given the amount of backtracking that it can find itself needing, but I don't see that being the case here.)

> The current draft doesn't really do anything (much) towards specifying a
> processor (even one using a DOM AI) Nothing about how the nput is fed
> in, or how the results and.or errors are fed back out.

Exactly, it only uses the DOM as a concrete definition of the data model that is used to interpret the document from the token stream. That's why I'm having trouble seeing what we gain from dropping that.

-- 
Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ - @robinberjon

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Received on Monday, 27 February 2012 21:05:47 UTC