- From: Joseph Kesselman <keshlam@us.ibm.com>
- Date: Fri, 15 Feb 2002 09:32:57 -0500
- To: "Allen, Michael B (RSCH)" <Michael_B_Allen@ml.com>
- Cc: www-dom@w3c.org
On Thursday, 02/14/2002 at 07:07 EST, "Allen, Michael B (RSCH)" <Michael_B_Allen@ml.com> wrote: > Why does the DOMString type needs to be defined at all? The nature of a language binding is that it brings everything down to language-specific interfaces and types, so that code written against that binding will compile and run against all instances of that binding. If you don't nail down DOMString to _something_, you don't have a binding. The solution we've used in the past is for the binding to state what specific type DOMString is mapped to. Another solution would be to say that DOMString will itself be a specific interface in this binding, derived from or wrapped around whatever the implementation wants to use. There's nothing inherently wrong with providing a DOM-like API that supports only 8-bit characters in a specific encoding, if you know that's all your customers are going to want... but if you do so, be sure to clearly document that divergence and don't claim to be a fully compliant DOM implementation. You'll benefit from folks not having to relearn the API architecture, but you'll lose interoperability with other systems... and interoperability is part of the point of the DOM. ______________________________________ Joe Kesselman / IBM Research
Received on Friday, 15 February 2002 10:40:23 UTC