Full infoset support for DOM 3 Core

I've noticed that there are several information items in the XML Infoset
that are not currently exposed in the DOM Level 3 core. These include:

1. The type of attribute
2. The notations and unparsed entities of a document
3. The base URI of an element 

There are probably others. Some of these are needed for implementing
other standards such as XPath and XInclude. Some of these can be
inferred from other information. For instance the notations and unparsed
entities decalred for a document might be accessible through the
abstract schemas, but that's a little difficult and not likely to be
implemented everywhere. 

I would like to propose what amounts to a change in the requirements for
DOM level 3:

All information items defined in the XML Infomration Set should be
easily accessible from DOM Level 3 core. In most cases the attributes in
question should be readwrite, though there may be exceptions to this.

This would require adding a number of methods to the various interfaces.
However, the benefits would be significant. For instance it would allow
XPointer and XSLT to be implemented in a pure DOM environment. Currently
they can't be because there's no way to support the id() function
without an attribute type. There are many similar examples. 


-- 
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ 
|         XML in a Nutshell (O'Reilly & Associates, 2001)            |
|              http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/books/xian/                |
|   http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596000588/cafeaulaitA/   |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
|  Read Cafe au Lait for Java News:  http://metalab.unc.edu/javafaq/ | 
|  Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://metalab.unc.edu/xml/     |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+

Received on Tuesday, 4 September 2001 12:50:04 UTC