RE: [dom-xpath] XPath or? (was RE: Announcing www-dom-xpath@w3.org)

> >
> > My big point is, I don't think that all new API in the W3C should become
> > part of the DOM.
>
> That's definitely one quite possible outcome of this discussion!  We could
> simply write a W3C Note proposing a common XPath API that is more
> tangentially related to the DOM. The main argument for putting it *in* the
> DOM is efficiency - one can do a lot inside a DOM implementation
> to support
> indexing/inverted lists/etc. that would make XPath queries work well that
> would be much harder *on top of* the DOM.
>

Adding an XPath API as another *optional* chapter of the DOM spec, similar
to the way the new DOM Level 2 chapters were handled (e.g., Traversal,
Range, etc.), seems like a good compromise. This way DOM implementations
that want to optimize the API internally can, while others are free to
ignore it. As with the others, hasFeature can be use to query for the API.

It seems like we need to decide on where it should go before discussing what
it looks like since it definitely has impact on the result.

-aaron

Received on Tuesday, 2 May 2000 16:17:54 UTC