Anybody for a server-DOM spec?

The current DOM spec is next to useless for server-side
applications. It contains way too much baggage designed
for client-side scripting that only benefits basically
two or three big vendors. It has almost no support for
editing (since there are no defined 'set' methods for
most of the node tree mutation attributes).

I propose that a group of interested people get together
to define a new spec (using the current one as a base)
that lends itself to efficient server-side implementations
and that can share nodes between implementations.
It is impossible to create distributed documents with the
current DOM because of the baffling constraint that all
nodes must be from the same implementation and that
node collections must be 'live'. There are quite a few
other problems with the DOM that preclude server-side
use as it stands.

Most of the people using the DOM for server-side applications
are most likely creating non-conforming implementations and
it is sad that these implementations will not be interchangeable.
We need to come up with a basic server-DOM spec before things get
too whacky.
My current implementation has a switch that enables/disables
conformance, but thats kind of silly and doesn't allow for
a really efficient and small-footprint implementation.

It may be worthwhile to create a new list for this purpose,
perhaps www-server-dom ?

- Claude Zervas

Received on Friday, 14 August 1998 14:26:57 UTC