RE: Full infoset support for DOM 3 Core

> -----Original Message-----
> From: www-dom-request@w3.org 
> [mailto:www-dom-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of
> Elliotte Rusty Harold
> Sent: Tuesday, September 04, 2001 12:42 PM
> To: www-dom@w3.org
> Subject: 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 is some interest among WG member concerning these questions, although
frankly the default assumption seems to be that they should be addressed in
Level 4.  My personal understanding is the the DOM Core should NOT have
dependencies on anything other than well-formed XML + namespaces; there are
some grey areas (such as the Level 1 external entity handling, and LEvel 2
getElementById) that add require knowledge of DTD contents by Core methods,
but these were done for purely pragmatic reasons in the absence of
DTD/schema support.  Attribute types and notations arguably fall into the
same category, but I'd hate to let the whole camel into the tent just
because it got its nose inside :~) 

Do you really care if such support is added in AS rather than Core?
(Offhand, a lot of what you're asking for seem like AS convenience methods
to me.) What about a module (hypothetical Level 4 requirement?) for
XMLBase+XLink+XInclude that might  support this stuff?  



> 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. 


Specific proposals would be welcomed; I suspect that we would consider
adding a small number of methods that would make people's lives easier, but
I doubt if there's much enthusiasm for changing the requirements and going
though the laborious process of identifying all the additions to DOM Level 3
that the new requirements logically mandate.  Also, anyone else who is
seriously frustrated by the DOM's lack of support for everything exposed by
the InfoSet should express their opinion!

Received on Tuesday, 4 September 2001 16:31:47 UTC