Re: DOM Level 1 Becomes a W3C Recommendation

At 02:17 PM 10/1/98 -0400, John Cowan wrote:
>msabin@cromwellmedia.co.uk wrote:
>
>> What's wrong with a documented precondition for the
>> method? That's been deemed good enough in all the
>> APIs I've ever seen. How much hand-holding do DOM
>> users need?
>
>DOM Level 1 is all *about* handholding.  That's why NodeLists
>and NamedNodeMaps and HTMLCollections have to be live, because
>the users of Level 1 aren't believed to be smart enough to
>figure out when to refresh them.  The assumption is that amateurs
>will be creating programs (typically in scripting languages)
>that edit DOM documents, and we can't allow them to create
>data structures which will cause other DOM methods to malfunction.

Very well put, and you're right -- for Level 1, we assumed that DOM users
would need lots of handholding.  It's unfortunate that this causes so much
overhead for those who don't need handholding and don't want to pay the
overhead, but remember that Level 1 was driven mostly by the PRESSING need
to get Netscape and Microsoft to play nicely together. 

>Would you rather have the overhead, while traversing the DOM, of
>checking for loopiness?  Presumably not.

There has been some sentiment expressed to define a 'server-side DOM' or a
'canonical DOM' or whatever that would be a conformance level that is more
suited to high-performance applications written by expert programmers.  The
idea is basically on hold, partly because there is a W3C effort to define a
'canonical' subset of XML, and it would make sense to tailor the 'canonical
DOM' to that. (For example, *if* that subset of XML does not support
entities, then probably the canonical subset of the DOM should not support
entities). If this idea is important to anyone, lobby for it!

Received on Thursday, 1 October 1998 14:33:20 UTC