Re: DOM Level 1 Becomes a W3C Recommendation

>Better that than allowing loops in the tree.

Matter of taste. This is one of those items where you have to ask whether
it's worth the performance hit to detect and prevent something that a
properly written application won't do, or to accept that badly written apps
will get themselves into trouble and deliver better performance to the ones
that aren't broken. Both tradeoff points are reasonable ones.

There's something to be said for the argument that "When it is not
necessary to decide, it is necessary to not decide."

It might have made more sense to document that such trees are poorly formed
and will cause this exception in _some_ DOMs, and then let each DOM decide
whether to protest always, never, or sometimes. Make it a
quality-of-implementation issue rather than locking it into the spec, and
let the marketplace decide which modality they prefer.

I can live with it either way; I'm mostly arguing from an aesthetic point
of view.

______________________________________
Joe Kesselman  / IBM Research
Unless stated otherwise, all opinions are solely those of the author.

Received on Thursday, 1 October 1998 14:12:29 UTC