Xpath and DOM

[Michael Champion]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Leigh Dodds" <ldodds at ingenta.com>
To: "xml-dev" <xml-dev at ic.ac.uk>
Sent: Friday, December 17, 1999 4:50 AM
Subject: RE: Xpath and DOM


> > Actually, I would have preferred to have a small set of
> > query mechanism independent API in the DOM API.
>
> You're right it would make sense to have it separate to
> the DOM.

I completely agree.  The DOM is not "the" API for all XML standards, it is
meant to be a foundation upon other W3C APIs can be built.  The DOM
extensions for individual specs might be trivial, e.g. the XSLT people might
want to simply define a method such as [off the top of my head]
transformNode(Node input, Node output, Node stylesheet) so that everyone
implementing XSLT in a DOM-compatible system uses the same names.  At the
other extreme is SVG, which is defining a whole set of DOM-compatible
interfaces to expose the higher-level semantics of SVG.  XPath (either the
WG or the user community) is free to do likewise.

The DOM working group would much rather be a source of advice on how to make
APIs that are DOM-compatible, platform neutral, vendor neutral, etc. than to
be the ultimate standardization authority for XML APIs.

On the other hand, if there are problems in DOM Level 2 that impede an
implementation of XPath or a definition of simple XPath extensions, they
should be reported to www-dom at w3.org RIGHT AWAY.




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