- From: <keshlam@us.ibm.com>
- Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 13:01:23 -0400
- To: www-dom@w3.org
>Those of us who need to represent DTD's _must_ define new node types. There are other solutions. Produce a custom representation for the DTD. Or store the DTD as a normal document tree, with nodes for ELEMENT_DECL and ATTR_DECL and so on, specifying the names via attributes -- in other words, translate on the fly into something like the XML Schema syntax -- subclassing or adding access methods to ease lookup. Hopefully we'll (finally!) fix that hole in Level 3, so this particular need will go away. Cutover costs from any of these to DOM Level 3's official solution is likely to be roughly equivalent, with lowest conversion cost possibly being the schema-like approach since I think that's the direction the DOM is likely to go (because it would allow applications to ignore the syntax issue). I'm not entirely opposed to the concept of extending the DOM via custom node types. But I do have some serious concerns about the portability impact if those appear as part of the main document tree, so I would consider it a last-ditch solution... and I'm not really sure we want to bless it rather than benignly ignore it. It has to be an implementation-specific solution anyway, since creating a new node type will at the very least require subclassing a specific implementation's Node/s. ______________________________________ Joe Kesselman / IBM Research
Received on Monday, 4 October 1999 13:02:07 UTC