Re: Current state of DOM2 Traversel and Range

Hi Ian,

On Mon, 7 Sep 2009, Ian Hickson wrote:
> On Sun, 6 Sep 2009, Morten Barklund wrote:
>>
>> What would be the purpose of a rewrite and what would be the work
>> involved?
>
> The purpose would be to make it so well-defined that implementations
> could  be interoperable without reverse-engineering each other. The work
> involved  would be writing a new spec from scratch, probably about 10-20
> hours a  week for four months, followed by maintenance and bug fixing,
> probably  about 5 hours a week for six months, followed by waiting for
> someone else  to write a test suite, helping them out where possible and
> fixing problems  they find, probably a few years with minimal work on
> average but with the  occasional 20-hour week when an implementor or
> tester finds a bunch of  problems at once.

This actually does not sound as intimidating to me, as it might could have.

I am quite an experienced technical writer, but of course never anything
in this scale.

What would be the expected coverage of the two new specifications? Would
they cover only what the single specification covers today (but with a lot
more detail of course) or should many new things be added to them? E.g. if
some implementor extended his implementations with extra features, could
they be deemed interesting enough to creep into the specification?

I will try to do some reverse engineering (if I can't find it done by
someone else) on different implementors to pinpoint key differences for
starters. Are there any important implementors besides browsers, that I
should be aware of?

-- 
Morten Barklund

Received on Tuesday, 8 September 2009 11:36:49 UTC