DOM - Creating Documents

[Kay Michael]

> Why doesn't the Document Object Model have a createDocument 
> method to allow the creation of a new Document instance?
> 
> I'd like to be able to build up a Document programmatically 
> and later save it to disk as an XML document. I can see that 
> the details of how a Document might be saved are implementation 
> specific, but surely the actual *creation* of a Document is 
> abstract enough to be included?

The SAXON package includes an interface to construct a Document from an
InputSource (defined as in SAX), and has drivers (implementations of this
interface) for a number of DOM products including SUN, IBM, Docuverse,
Oracle, and Datachannel.

Yes it would be nice if there were a standard interface, but in the meantime
you could try using the SAXON one. You can use it independently of the rest
of SAXON.

I realise this isn't exactly what you want because you want to create an
empty document; but you could do this by starting from an InputSource with a
minimal XML document. (A well-formed XML document, of course, always
contains at least one element, so I can see products legitimately objecting
to you creating a document that contains no elements).

Mike Kay 

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