RE: Discussion of DOM with Glen Gorden of Henter-Joyce (A) (A)

If we had a DOM which encompassed the scope of web documents (in which I
am including multimedia 'documents' and the range of other beasties that
are out there on the horizon) then the DOM would indeed be a very powerful
approach. It is also completely Open and platform-independent, which means
it is possible to develop applications which use it in standardised ways.
However, DOM level 1 is a long way from that promise. It seems that the
group needs to decide whether it wants to support DOM 1 and thereby
signpost its expectation that DOM2 and DOM3 and DOM4 and so on will
represent the best way forward, or whether the group would rather leave
the question of what interface should be used to User Agent developers.

Charles McCathieNevile

On Mon, 8 Feb 1999, Charles Oppermann wrote:
  
  Remember what DOM means - Document Object Model.  It's not an assistive
  technology interface, it's not even a user interface object model.  It's an
  object model for documents - HTML documents to be specific.
  
  Text object model developers find DOM inadequate to represent higher end
  markup and layout.
  
  I caution the group not to put too much stock into DOM.  While I feel it's
  very useful to improve access to the web content - that is one small piece
  of a users experience with a computer.
  

--Charles McCathieNevile            mailto:charles@w3.org
phone: +1 617 258 0992   http://purl.oclc.org/net/charles
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative    http://www.w3.org/WAI
MIT/LCS  -  545 Technology sq., Cambridge MA, 02139,  USA

Received on Monday, 8 February 1999 20:07:13 UTC