Re: Having both core access and XML-only access

At 01:06 PM 12/4/97 -0500, Joe Lapp wrote:
>Mike Champion <mcc@arbortext.com> wrote:
>>Overall, it seems like you're asking the DOM to do way too much; [...]
>>this as an interesting PRODUCT idea that could be layered on top of the DOM
>>[...] it's not clear to me the extent to which XML consumers will be
>>concerned about always maintaining the validity of their documents.
>
>It is asking DOM to do a lot.  However, I think there is a need to have
>standard interfaces for manipulating XML documents that enforce validity.
>The existence of such a need has two dependencies: a need to centrally
>enforce validity, and a need for the mechanism to be a standard.
>

It's funny ... I had a discussion at lunch in which I became convinced that
having standard validation methods in the DOM *would* be a good idea,
especially in a distributed XML application in which "validity" could only
be determined by some server-side process that saw the big picture ...
Anyway, I think there are a lot of good ideas here, but we're so deep in
the mud building foundations at the moment that it's hard to think about
the upper stories.  I *can* see the utility of a VALIDXML interface a
couple of levels up (Level 3 or 4), and I hope you can bear with us until
we can give this the consideration it deserves.

In the meantime, part of the work to validate the lower level specs is to
think through what it would take to build higher-level applications on top
of the Level 1 DOM.  To the extent that one can point to flaws in Level 1
that  would make such a DOM application (or a Level n extension) difficult,
we can try to fix the underpinnings now. So the more real
design/prototyping work people can do with Level 1, the better Levels 2, 3
... will be. 

Mike

Received on Thursday, 4 December 1997 13:42:21 UTC